Patrick McDowell's Blog

Well hello again and welcome to another episode of me not updating my blog for over a month. I’ll be you host, Patrick McDowell, so let’s get started!

Alright seriously, hello from beautiful Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I am here celebrating a traditional get-together with my family, while getting some time to relax as well. I hope everyone is doing great and enjoying life to the fullest! WordPress wanted me to let you know that I updated to version 2.8.4 (although secretly I think they are trying to score some free advertising, but don’t tell them I know this!)

Project Updates

Okay so the SEO Tip of the Day was obviously put on a hold, with the last update being on July 12th. Basically the story behind that is it’s been way to busy to think of a new topic daily, then write 500 words on it. I am considering moving it to a weekly tip instead of a daily one, but I’ll keep you guys updated.

Some time ago I mention plans to launch a step-by-step of an affiliate marketing project, which would show users not very farmiliar with the industry how to make some money online. After much procrastination, I am finally planning all of it out, and it will begin when I get back next week. I’m pretty excited about it, as it is going to be a huge project and I think you guys will learn a lot.

Just wanted to get this blog started again, I’ll update more here soon… it’s getting close to 1AM so I’m going to hit up some Sopranos. Cheers!

Welcome to day two. From here on out, these tips are going to be quick and to the point. Time is money, and the less time you spend reading the more you have to act. Today’s tip is going to be on optimizing your images for Google Images.

Why would you want to do this you ask? This is something a lot of people miss out on that can be a gold mine if done correctly. If you can get in the first page of image results for your keyword, you acquire both maximum exposure and potential links (one of the rare instances where hotlinking isn’t bad). Still not enough of a reason? If you can get in the top handful of image results, you could also show up in the regular organic results. Take the keyword carrots for example.

Google bots can’t “see” the image you have, so they rely on its name(s) and the content surrounding it to place it properly. Naturally to have the best change of ranking high for your target keyword, your image has to be well optimized for Google. To do that we are going to add div tags around it, then drop the keyword into the actual image name, Alt image tag, and meta file summary. The example below uses yesterdays post on 301 redirects, and we will be optimizing the “SEO Tip of the Day” image on the top right.

<div><img title=”SEO Tip of the Day” src=”http://crims0n.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/SEO-Tip-of-the-Day.png” alt=”SEO Tip of the Day” width=”220″ height=”96″ /><br />SEO Tip of the Day</div>

Sometimes the meta file summary looks tacky, and in that case don’t use it. If you looked at the actual code I have up, you probably noticed I left it out myself. That is all there is to it. One more quick tip, if you are shooting for showing up in organic results as well, make sure your images are at least 300 x 300 in size. Smaller images tend not to make it.

As always, ask any questions you may have below

Welcome to the first in my SEO Tip of the Day series! If the title is not self-explanatory enough, I will be providing you with daily tips in SEO, Internet marketing, and web design to help you learn the business, or keep your memory fresh. So without further delay, today we will be covering the importance of 301 redirects.

Any time you make a major change in your website, search engines need time to figure out what you did, and update your rankings accordingly. If you do not properly “instruct” the search engines on what you changed, they can no longer find the page that is in their results. As you can imagine this effect would be disastrous, so how do you change a URL without being penalized for it?

Let’s look at an example. Your doing some on-page SEO and you decide to change this:

yourdomain.com/startrek_novel_01.jpg

To this:

yourdomain.com/novels/science_fiction/startrek.jpg

Obviously you made a wise choice, as the second URL is much more organized, and thus will rank better. However now potential customers that may have bookmarked this page can now no longer get to it, and it won’t be long before you loose any and all rank you had for that page in the search engines. Luckily a quick 301 redirect will fix both of these issues. Simply add one line to your .htaccess file:

(If you are not sure what or where your .htaccess file is, it is a small text file located at the top level of your domain. It is possible you may not have one, and if that is the case just fire up notepad, save it as whatever, upload it to the top of your domain, and rename it “.htaccess” without the quotes.)

That’s all you have to do. Now anytime a visitor or a spider goes to the original URL, they will be automatically redirected to your new one. As mentioned before, this is particularly important for search engines, because if you use 301 redirects your rankings will be preserved. Just remember, it would be wise to do this for every URL change you make. Never assume the search engines understand what you are doing, regardless of how simple it may seem.

If you would simply like to redirect everything on one domain to another, use the following:

Redirect 301 / http://www.yourdomain.com

Note the “/” before your target URL. That indicates everything from the top level of your old domain down should be redirected. You can also redirect dynamic content, however that is beyond the scope of today.

Well that wraps up our first day. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments below. Until tomorrow, cheers