2009 October + Agent SEO

For October, 2009

#1399: Using CSS Image Replacement for Non Web-Safe Fonts

Posted: October 8, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 473 views // View Comments

CSS Image Replacement can be a great way to utilize non web-safe fonts in your designs, while not hurting your SEO.

If you’re a designer, you’ve run into the issue of web-safe fonts in your designs before. If you’re not a designer, then you might be wonder just what IS a web-safe font?

Web-safe fonts are those fonts likely to be present on a wide range of computer systems, and are used by web content authors to increase the chance that content will be displayed in their chosen font. If a visitor to a website does not have the specified font, their browser will select an alternative — in the case of dingbat typefaces the alternative is unlikely to have similar…

#1380: Image Optimization & Naming Files: Help Search Engines Help You

Posted: October 6, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 289 views // View Comments

How you name your images can be just as important as how you tag them.

Images present a very unique problem webcrawlers. A search engine webcrawler doesn’t have the ability to view and image on the web and inherently know what that image is depicting. In other words, unless we (the webmasters and SEO’s) help them out, they are blind as a bat!

“Help Me Help You”

Like the famous quote from the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire“, search engines want you to Help Them Help You. There are many benefits to optimizing your site’s images, including inclusion into the image directories (which sometimes get injected into search results), and…

#1352: How to Write Highly-Optimized Title Tags

Posted: October 1, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 416 views // View Comments

Good title tags can be a great way to make a splash in search engine rankings quickly.

In SEO, there are a lot of theories. Optimize this, optimize that, do this, do that. There’s white-hat, and black-hat, and grey-hat, and {insert color} hat to describe the different methodologies and philosophies that make up the practice of Search Engine Optimization. Lots of SEO’s say do this or that and tell you WHY you need to do something, but when you ask HOW they might very well clam up.

For example (and for the purposes of what we’ll be covering in this article), they might vaguely say that “For SEO purposes, You need to write better page titles.” Well…