To a search engine, an image is only worth a few words. A visit to the website for the movie Pirates of the Caribbean displays a large flash based image, links, and text. Unfortunately, the links, quotes, and other info on this page are largely invisible. While this page can be exiting to a human viewer, search engines view this page with less excitement; in fact Google locates only 32 words from this URL.

Above: Images need to have SEO techniques applied too! A screen shot above shows the text that Google was able to index from the URL http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates/ on December 23rd, 2006. Much of the content that an engine can obtain from the Pirates page is locked as an unreadable image.

Below: A screen shot image of the page that a human visitor would see. Go to the URL or see the image below for spots where text is locked into unreadability on this page. Notice that at point A. there is navigation through the Disney site and Pirates site, at point B. there are a number of quotes about the movie, and at point C. there are links for Disney help, related motion picture URLs. Yet none of this information is available for indexing by Google. This presents SEO opportunities.

Nearly all of the content that is part of this flash based image and page is lost to a search engine. There are several steps that you can take to maximize the ability of an engine to at least discern some of the important content from the a page or image like this.

Rescue words from images
First and most importantly when you can rescue words from the images do so. Since the value of an image to an engine is significantly less than normal text, this is a good place to start.

It may mean that you include a no script tag if the entire or most of the page is an image like the Pirates site example.

This may mean that you strategically take text that is in the image or flash content and place in normal text on the page.

Use the Keyword in the name of the image
When naming an image the use of the keyword in the image name is beneficial. This can be helpful for image searches on an engine, as well as to help the engines to understand the idea that an image may be trying to provide and it may provide a better understanding of the page’s overall theme. So, pirates-caribbean-dead-mans-skull.jpg would be an improvement if the old file name was skull.jpg. (No, .gif or .jpg does not matter, so use the image format that makes sense for your image.)

Place the image caption next to the image
Place a caption next to the image, with the keyword in close proximity to the image on the site.

Place the keyword in the text content that surrounds the image
If the image is placed in the body, and surrounded by text content having the keyword physically close to the image will also have benefits.

Use Alt tags
The use of Alt tags as part of the site design is important. While it is postulated by many SEOs that search engines rarely use Alt tags purely for ranking purposes, many agree that it more likely that Alt tags are used by search engines to gain a better understanding of a page’s target keywords or theme.

Above: The image above is a screen shot where I was hovering my mouse over the first image in this article. There is a yellow pop up box that my browser uses to display Alt text like: “Images need SEO too, this screen shot shows text cached by Google.”

Use Keywords in anchor text
Anchor text is the visible text that is displayed as part of the url, this is often referred as link text as well. An example of anchor or link text is contained in a link back to this article using text like this SEO for Images, which is preferred over non generic, non-SEO link text like a click here text link.

While these 6 ideas are important parts of site optimization for images, the first one is very important for over all website optimization. Whenever possible the design of a site should include text content for the engines to digest. Even the use of buttons can be improved by positioning the keyword as part of the anchor text over the buttons image using cascading style sheets.

Conclusion

As we discussed above search engines are not able to read the content of images on web pages. If your web pages have buttons or image maps, test is largely in your graphics, opportunities to communicate with the engines are being missed. When a design requirement dictates that you will need to use a graphic, use some of the basic options mentioned in this article to assist the engines in understanding the content of the images on your site. Each one of the opportunities presents an avenue to bring additional clients to your site and ultimate can result in additional sales.

Disclaimer: While the MarketPosition team enjoys the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and we think it has great special effects, the views or opinions of the MarketPosition staff does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of our parent company.

Is .COM Considered An International Domain?

The .com domain is typically the most sought after and well known of all domain types. While a .us top level domain does exist for US companies to register, it is thought that search engines consider a .com address as related primarily to US based websites or often used by sites that are not typically country specific. If your site is based in the UK, you might still consider a .com domain as it is easy for customers to remember, but if you are focusing primarily on UK search engines, register a .co.uk domain. If your site is in Ireland, an .ie domain should be considered, .fr for France, .in for India, .ca for Canada, and so on.

If you have both a regional and .com domain, the next question is do you use both or do you use only one and forward visitors from one URL to the other? If you have the resources to maintain both web sites, it is not a bad idea to keep both URLs up and running. If you do this and they are both in the same language, make sure that each has its own unique content to avoid duplication penalties. You may even link between the two domains to provide some link popularity between the domains but don’t over do it. There is an line drawn between what some engines consider a “articifical linking network” and simply two or more sites that link to one another. On the other side, if one site is one language and you have another URL that has roughly the same content but in another language like say Italian, search engines generally do not penalize for duplicated content in different languages.

International Hosting

Like a domain name, where your site is hosted can play a role in rankings. In real life, if you spoke with an accent, this non-verbal clue may help someone to identify where you were born or grew up. Similarly, if you are a UK or Scottish company, the IP address can be a give away. Does your site have pages served from a fairly local server in Edinburgh, Scotland or is it served from a location like Dallas, Texas? Search engines can use this information to further identify your site for regional or international rankings.

If the hosting company you use tells you that their offices are in the UK or they use a .co.uk domain for their site’s URL, be aware that they could be a reseller for another company in another country. In some cases, they may use a co-location service to host or manage web hosting servers in another country rather than in the country that their domain would seem to specify. Get in touch with your current or potential web hosting service to see where they host from. You may find that you will need to seek other hosting options or you may need to simply ask them to move your site to a server that they manage in the same target country.

If you are already online, you may be able to check where your site is being hosted from on your own. There are various tools online like those at DNS Stuff and Canvas Dreams’ Web Host Locator which can check on your URL and give you the data that you need.

Don’t Hide Your International Address, Phone Number, Etc.

Have a local or international phone number (a non-800/888 number)? Do you have an international business address? While it may seem like over-kill on some sites, depending on the design/style of the site, it’s not a bad idea to keep this type of information readily available on many or all of your web site’s pages. There are both SEO and non-SEO reasons for this.

SEO reasons: Niche keyword searches. While there are many keywords which are very difficult to rank on such as mortgage, real estate, realtor, etc., some searchers use a combination of items like a postal or zip code, a partial street address, a partial phone number, or other information along with a keyword or two during their search in order to narrow down general searches to something more specific. Since many of these combinations provide only a few hits per month, many companies ignore trying to optimize for these keyword combinations, and thus improve your chances of appearing with the addition of your contact info on the page or some basic optimization.

Customer Service reasons: Customers generally should not have to dig through your site’s architecture in order to contact you if you have a high contact or regional specific company such as in real estate, mortgages, building supplies, local groceries, etc. While you generally want customers to read through your site in order to answer most of their questions before they contact you, every one reads/understands information in a different manner and they may not know or understand that they should click the ‘contact us’, ‘about us’, or a similar page for such information.

Directions To Your Location

Although I think you should keep your contact information on most your pages, this doesn’t mean that you should remove or forget to use some type of ‘contact us’, ‘about us’, or a similar page on your site. When you create this page, do use words that represent your country, regional naming conventions, states, zones, and other words that describe your location. If you have any abbreviations, spell them out as well. After all “St.” could reference a street, a suite, or a saint.

Give driving directions from a few well known locations rather than simply relying on external services. The content on your site helps you for SEO reasons and helps your customers to find you. If you want to also place links to an external mapping/driving directions service in order to give your visitors a means of double checking directions, go for it, but these external links normally do not play a direct part in helping you to obtain higher rankings.

Localized Language

Even if you speak the same language as the country and international site that you are attempting to get ranked, there may be regional or local spelling differences, slightly different terms to use, grammar differences, or other challenges to take into consideration. Although I speak US based English, it makes a difference if I am trying to SEO pages for boot repair parts and trunk repair parts in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. A boot is a type of shoe in most of these areas but outside of the US it can also indicate the storage compartment of a car. In the US we would call this area a trunk where as both in the US and elsewhere, a trunk usually indicates the main portion of a tree or a large container for storing items.

In Mexico and Span the way that one would optimize for mortgage lending services differs as well. The term “bienes raices” in commonly used in Mexico and in the Spanish speaking areas of the US and roughly means “real estate” or literally “root assets”. In Spain you would use a term like “inmobiliaria” to describe real estate. In Mexico and the US you would use the term “prestamista” for a lender such as a mortgage broker or loan officer where as in Spain this term is often used for dishonest or questionable lenders such as “loan sharks“. So you would not necessarily use the same terms in the same language to optimize for different countries that have a common language.

I love tools like Babel Fish and search engine based translation systems, but I would not put complete trust in them to accurately and meaningfully translate any web site for strict business and SEO purposes due to language nuances. Because of factors like these, a good translator or regional copy writer is a must.

Summary

SEOs are constantly working to improve website rankings but international and regional web sites often need a few extra tweaks to help them rank well. If you are attempting to improve a web site’s ranking in an international engine, there are some basic steps that can take to increase the odds of ranking well. Use a domain that relates to your target country rather than a general domain like .com. If you use both a regional domain and a .com, provide unique content on both sites. Obtain hosting services from an IP address/host that is actually located in the country that you are targeting. Be obvious about your company contact information by placing it on all or many pages of your site so that it is easy for customers to find and easy for search engines to index. Even if you have basic contact information on many pages of your site, do have a “contact us” or similar page. Do research your target market’s keywords and language style, if you are not native to the target country, and consider hiring some one to translate or regionalize the text for you. While these ideas may not cause your site to rocket to the top rankings in a international search engine over night, taken as a whole (along with traditional linking and SEO strategies), they can give you an edge toward improved rankings.