One of the most often overlooked elements of SEO (though I don’t really know why, given how much coverage it gets) is the alt attribute. You will notice that I am saying alt attribute rather than alt tag, because that is what it is. ‘Alt tag’ is used so often incorrectly, for there is no <alt ></alt> in html markup, therefor it cannot be a tag, there is however, an alt attribute that is attached to other tags, for example <img src”" alt”" /> where <img /> is the tag, and src=”" and alt=”" are the attributes.

The alt attribute’s use, as many will already know; is to describe the image, because search engines and screen readers cannot see what the image is of. Leaving out alt attributes from your image tags, or leaving them empty, means that search engines are missing some of your content.

For example on the product page you may have the title of the product in the Meta title, and the H1 of the page, but not in the page copy, because the page copy may be talking about the product without actually referring to it by its specific model name. If you have an image in the page copy with another instance of the product name located in the alt attribute, this can provide some further reenforcement to search engines as to the relevance of your page.

When I first learned to build websites, I would create my site layout in photoshop, then slice the layout up and present it in a table. I would then overlay my actual textual content with an absolutely positioned div (some of my old sites are still using this layout!). The benefit of this method was of course the very small amount of coding time, and the reasonable result. The downside however, was the need for image maps for links, javasccript for rollovers, and absolutely positioned divs, which aren’t the most flexible of creatures.

How does this relate to alt attributes? Well when I used this type of layout, i would have between 9 and 18 images that were simply the background of the site – there was no real appropriate alt attribute because they would have just had to have been ‘background image1, 2, 3′ etc. The option some people take of course is to use this to their advantage and put a different key phrase in every image’s markup, but if you think that search engines don’t know that trick, then you’re stuck in the 90’s.

That said, you don’t want your alt attributes to be too bare either, ‘my product, from my company name and my services’ will always be more effective than ‘my product’, if you catch my drift. There’s a fine balance, and unlike Meta content, there is no set limit as to how many characters search engines will accept. There are however, general guidelines that you can follow; if you have trouble reading it, you’ve tried too hard. If you feel like you’re reading an advertisement, you’ve tried too hard, and finally, if you find yourself reading a list of words rather than a very short sentence, you’ve tried too hard.

I’ll be honest, I don’t like alt attributes. As a FireFox user I rarely ever see them, and I like it that way. Thought I will admit that they are useful for SEO purposes, and definitely should not be overlooked.

Welcome back to part 2 of SEO Stat Packages, in part 1 I gave you an overview of Web Position Gold, traffic reports, link popularity, and search engine saturation. Today, we’ll take a look at Google Analytics, Xenu, and Google Webmaster Tools.

So lets get started!

After running all my reports from the previous post I move swiftly on to (and from) Google Analytics. I say swiftly because it is just that, generally speaking not a lot of time is spent on Google Analytics just because it provides a lot of basic information that is available in more detail from other stat software. If you don’t do any other stats, Analytics is a great one to have because it does give you a very good general overview. I find though, that the information is too basic (at least for my needs).

Where Analytics comes into its own though, is with ecommerece tracking. Analytics provides a really great overview of online sales, revenue generation, adsense campaigns, and conversion rates from both key phrases and specific search engines. If your site has an online shop, the value of having Analytics installed multiplies by a factor of ten. Make sure when installing though that you use the new ga.js not the old urchin.js - especially when wanting to set up ecommerce tracking.

Once I’ve had a brief skim over Analytics I move on to the part of SEO statistics analysis that I hate most; error reporting. This is basically checking for parts of the site that are either not there, or not functioning correctly, and are causing the search engines problems when spidering. Needless to say, fixing these problems nine times out of ten is just as big of a headache.

Sometimes websites just go wrong, pages disappear, dynamic scripts are executed wrong, and databases re-arrange themselves before shooting off to the pub for a quick pint. There’s no real way of stopping it from happening, so the best thing to do is accept that its going to happen, be ready for it, and check for these errors on a regular basis to catch them out early.

Our first stop on error reporting will be with Xenu. When search engines look over a site, they send out a spider. Its called a spider because it follows the web (the world wide one) and explores all the links it finds and follows them too, clever eh? So a spider is basically a script that tests every link on your site.

Xenu is a free program (windows) that is your own personal spider, you can fire it up, tell it what site you want it to look at, and off it goes with its 8 furry little spider’s legs. Xenu reports any broken links or images found, so basically any tag with an src or href attribute. Once its finished munching on flies and other such spidery things, it offers you a report, which will tell you where all you’re broke links are, and where they’re coming from. That was the easy part, now go fix them.

The second part of error reporting consists of using Google Webmaster Tools, which is possibly my favorite SEO statistic tool.

Hit the diagnostics tab and have a look at any errors that are coming up. Xenu looks at broken links to your site that are inside your site, Webmaster Tools looks at broken links to your site across the entire internet. This is done when Google ‘crawls’ the net. If a spider whisks round one website then a crawl is basically a really big slow version that does ALL the websites. As such you have to wait for these errors to come up, you cant test for them using independent software.

Errors will come up most frequently in this context when a page on your site no longer exists, now, if this is a product that you no longer sell then thats fine, just leave it and eventually Google will realise that the page is gone, and stop trying to find it. If its a page that has changed name though, you need to fix it.

For example, mysite.com links to yoursite.com/you.htm but a few months later you decide that you want to change that page name to you-are-great.htm - you upload the new file, and delete the old one. The new url for that page is yoursite.com/you-are-great.htm - but I don’t know that, and neither do the 6 million other sites that are linking to that page, so you need to apply a 301 redirect to tell Google where to go. More on 301 redirects at a later date.

Now that the error reporting is done, we can get on to the slightly more interesting side of Webmaster Tools, statistics!

Webmaster Tools gives you 2 little tables that I could not live without. ‘Top Search Queries’ and ‘Top Clicked Queries’.

Which basically tells you; out of all the searches that your site ranks for, what terms are searched for most often. (your most valuable key phrases to target) and which search terms that you rank for get clicked most often. If you’re ranking number 1 for a term that gets searched for a lot, but your site is never getting clicked on - you need to go and find out why that is! I could spend hours writing another post on this alone!

But for now, we will keep it just about the stat packages, and I may explore that avenue here at a later date. (I feel like I’m using the words ‘at a later date’ rather a lot at the moment!)

Was this helpful to you? Have I missed any stat packages that you’d recommend? Drop me a line in the comments!

In my last post I gave you a brief introduction to social media marketing, or more specifically, to Digg. A more in depth guide to social media marketing to follow at a later date. Today, I’ll tell you the story that I alluded to in the introduction of the last post, and how you can use this to capitalise on your own social media marketing efforts.

Digg, as I’ve mentioned before, is a bit of a beast. Its very clicky, and there are certain very exclusive little groups aall over the place amongst the community. Naturally these little groups all Digg and Bury (the opposite of digging) the same stories, so offending one of these groups can be the worst thing you could possibly do. It should be noted however that while these groups have a bit of help in the form of eachother when trying to make a story popular, they are not the only people on Digg, you don’t need to be in a group to get your submissions on the front page, as I will demonstrate.

I have named this, the Bandwagon Method.

In short, you find a bandwagon, and make sure you’re the first to jump on it, and then take all the credit when everyone else jumps on too.

To start with you’ll need an RSS feed reader, my personal preferences are Shrook for mac, and SharpReader for windows. Once you have a feed reader you will need to subscribe to some blogs, Engadget, Gizmodo, and BBC Tech News are good places to start.

Once you’ve done that, you sit back, and wait for your bandwagon to arrive.

The beauty of the feed reader is that as soon as a story is published, you receive it (almost instantly, but sometimes with a few minutes delay) in your feed reader. This is where you sit and wait for the window of opportunity. What you’re looking for is a niche article, something that applies to many people, that is interesting, and that will be of concern to the average demographic of people who use Digg (17-36 yr old computer savvy internet enthusiasts). Once an article like this comes up in your feed reader, its time to pounce.

In my case the article that came up was from the BBC site, and was about Ebay banning negative feedback. This fits the above description perfectly, people who use digg are the same type of people who use ebay, so instantly I have identified that my product (article) was suitable for my target market (diggers). I quickly logged in to digg, and submitted the URL with a brief description.

And that was that, 24 hours later I had over 3,000 diggs.

I wish.

No, you can submit to digg as much as you like, but getting actual diggs is a whole different kettle of fish. Once submitted, I fired off a quick email to a few colleagues, and asked them to digg the story if they liked the article. Just from this I had gained about 6 diggs in 10 mins. It sounds insignificant, 6 diggs, but the first 25 diggs are the most difficult and most important to get. Once I’d done this I decided to ’share the article’ with my friends list.

On digg you can add people as your friends, much like myspace or facebook, except no one really knows anyone on digg. Too many friends and it becomes harder to get your story on the front page, too few friends and you have no one to help digg your submissions, but I digress, a more detailed article on the ins and outs of digg friends and how to optimise your friends list at a later date. For the time being I shared the article with the maximum number of friends that I could (about 60 I think). These shouts then appear on your friends’ profiles, and they see the story that you are sharing with them.

Admittedly though, the digg friend sharing extravaganza is very temperamental, and doesnt always help a great deal. I think I probably got another 4 diggs out of this.

Next I went to Tech Industry News (the category I had submitted to) clicked on upcoming, and then sorted by most popular. Think of this list like google, the more diggs you get the higher your rank is, once you go past number one on the front page of upcoming, you go into the mix with the stories in ‘popular’ (for that category) and once you reach the top of popular there you make your bid for the front page of digg.

14 Diggs in I was on the second page of upcoming tech industry news. I dugg a couple of the most popular upcoming stories to bump them up and get them on to the next list, helping me move up, and did a little more sharing with my friends. By now, it was time to leave the office for the day, so I packed up and shut down my computer (Ecofriendly egg that I am). I left work on about 36 diggs, on the front page of upcoming tech industry news.

I didn’t think much about the story for the next few hours, until I received a text from a colleague telling me that he had just ’shared’ my submission with some of his friends, hopefully this would make a difference! I logged on to check it out, and the article was on 92 diggs. Which was ok, but not great, so again I left it alone.

15 minutes later I returned to the article sitting on the homepage of all of digg, and with 472 diggs. Strange.

I think that digg has a tipping point, and once you pass that tipping point, (wherever it may be) and your submission moves on to the next page, whether that be upcoming, popular, or the front page, it is suddenly subject to thousands more people noticing it, and as such, many many more diggs. Clearly, I had reached this tipping point.

I sat in front of my computer in slight awe as I refreshed each minute to find the story up by about 12 diggs, every 60 seconds. Around 15 minutes later I was at over 600 diggs, and looking really prominent on the homepage with over 300 comments, the most out of all the stories there, even ones with over 1,000 diggs.

An hour later I was at over 1,800 diggs, and 400 comments. By this time I (sadly) was becoming less amazed, and more pleased with what was happening, so I didn’t bother refreshing quite so often.

The next morning I got up to check on progress. 2,675 Diggs. Incredible.

And finally, around the 24 hour mark the next day, I hit 3,000.

But

Why does it matter? How does submitting a BBC news article help my site in any way ?

Well, this particular one didn’t - I didn’t make any effort to manipulate the article or the submission to benefit myself, I just wanted to test my Bandwagon Method, and it worked. What my submission did do however, which isn’t completely standard for a big digg story, is it generated a lot of comments. Myself and the first colleagues who dugg the story started a brief scathing chat dicusing ebay and insulting dodgy sellers, and this became the foundation for the 600+ comments which ensued.

The value in using this method is if you can submit the story to digg, write your own follow up article on your site, and then post a legitimate link in the comments of your submission BEFORE it gets big.

If it is not a legitimate link, you will get burried so hard and fast that you’ll wish you’d taken up smoking years ago just to cope with all the abuse you’ll get. And if you try tagging a link onto a story thats already big, again you’ll be slated for being a spammer. In my opinion; the one way in which you can do it is by writing a good follow up article, with good content, and post it high up in the comments of your own submission. Then pray to the heavens for acceptance, for the diggers are both cruel and ruthless.

End result if you do it right? A fair amount of traffic, a little credibility, and a very strong feeling of satisfaction.

I would like to note in closing that I do not advocate in any way ‘rigging an article’ for digg, or using unfair practices jut to get your submission on the front page. This is merely an account of what I did, and how I think it worked. Use it as reference, or discredit it entirely, its up to you.

How long did it take you to get your first popular article on digg? Have you got an opinion or suggestion for other things that may help? Drop me a line in the comments.

The digg page as it is today

For many people in SEO, and many others who are just hardcore digg addicts; the prospect of getting one of your submissions to hit the front page of digg is sweeter than a new-born antilope covered in syrup. After 4 months or so of using digg, I finally got my first one popular, and by some margin too.

Digg, for those who don’t know, is a ‘current events’ site which is very much like any other news site you might see on the internet. The difference of course is that it isn’t just any old news site, on Digg the stories voted either for or against by the users of the site, so the homepage news is always what the most people have voted for. Think of it like a very big democracy thats only a LITTLE bit corrupt, that sometimes succeeds but generally just flails about wildly, like an online version of George Bush, but without the support staff. More on the ins and outs of digg and other Social Media sites in another post.

So, when I first set myself up on Digg, it was primarily for link building purposes, to establish new links coming back to the site which I was optimising, and as such build the site’s inbound link campaign, etc. Soon however, I realised that Digg isnt just any old social media site. There are hundreds of sites LIKE Digg that try and use the same sort of marketing model, but 90% of them fail completely. There are hundreds and hundreds of submissions every day, but no one ever reads them, and they are pretty much just big sites with a whole lot of links. This is where Digg comes into its own, being the age that it is, Digg has established an actual community, a large group of members who talk to eachother and talk about Digg - this makes the site more inviting for new members to join and participate in the ongoing user activity, rather than just hit submit and click off the site. So Digg, actually gets traffic through its submission, and we’re talking a LOT of traffic.

Recently, a colleague wrote an article for his own site - discussing an important SEO technique and pointing out the pros and cons of overcoming certain issues relating to it. Once he’d finished writing this article, he went to hit submit on Digg, but rather than just pasting in the same title he’d used on the blog, we sat down for 5 minutes and discussed what the most ‘clickable’ title would be for the post, and went with that. By the time we left the office for the day, the story was on 53diggs, which wasn’t bad at the time. The next morning when we returned however, we found the same submission on over 500diggs and sitting nicely on the front page of Tech Industry News. We later discovered that the traffic generated by Digg had crashed the server in the middle of the night, due to 23,000 unique visitors in the space of a few hours.

The article made the font page of Tech Industry News, but that was where it stopped and in the following days it gained another 50 diggs or so, before slowly sinking down into the rest of the long forgotten digg archives.

But this is where my inspiration was rather abruptly kicked into action. 23,000 unique visitors in 24 hours, and I felt like we’d only just scratched the surface.

The power of Social Media Marketing had suddenly become far more of a reality than the distant rumor that I had previously perceived it as.

Next time… How To: Get 3,000+ Diggs in 24 Hours