6 Tips on Image SEO

Images as an asset for organic search results and search engine optimization are often overlooked. Images can drive traffic through image search as well as inclusion in universal search results.

There are actually several dimensions to image optimization that involves better placement in search results, optimization for user experience and in some cases, optimization for easier sharing of images on the social web.

For image SEO, it can be helpful to think of optimizing images like optimizing a tiny webpage within your page. Things like url structure, anchor text and descriptive tagging are factors for optimizing images for search engines, just like regular webpages.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your images to improve their performance on the page and in search.

1. Find the right images

Finding the right kind of image is incredibly important. Great images can add another dimension to an article or page that can encourage people to share the page and create some great backlinks. Research shows that while text is still the first thing seen on the page, the image is what sells the page.
Here are some of the best places to actually find images:

• Flickr – Probably the de facto service for finding free images. They have a really useful creative commons search as well. Skellie has an excellent article on how to find Flickr images.
• stock.xchng – Weird name, but a ton of royalty-free stock images.
• iStockPhoto – Large selection of stock photos that you can buy.

You can also use Google Images to find images for your site, as long as you search with the proper licensing. (They allow you to search Creative Commons and other public licenses.) But you have to be very careful when using images, as if you don’t have the permission to reuse it, companies and sites can take legal action against you.
The general rule of thumb is this: if the image isn’t Creative Common licensed or you didn’t buy or create it, don’t post it.

2. Use the keyword(s) in the file name

Just like keywords in post urls are important for pages, the same is true for images. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy. For example, the image above was originally named “iStock_000004221245XSmall.jpg” which doesn’t add much information about this web page. It has been renamed to “image-optimization.jpg”. Of course, most images that are not simply decorative like the one above are literal and connected to the content of the page such as a photo of a product. If the above image were used in an article about eye color, then the file name should reflect that.
Google suggests that you should place your images in one folder on your site, mydomain.com/images versus placing them in random folders throughout the site. Another suggestion from Google related to file names or URLs of images is to make sure you use common image filetypes such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.

3. Create descriptive alt text

Alt text or tags are another way that search engines help determine what your image is about. Unlike traditional web content, search engines can’t determine the text content of an image. (Search spiders are pretty smart, but as far as I know they haven’t developed eyes yet.) As a result, search engines need to rely on captions around the image, alt text, file names and other surrounding text. Adding descriptive text in the alt tag helps the search engines determine what the content of the image is.
If an image is used as navigation, ie as a link to another page, be sure to use alt text that is meaningful to the content of the page being linked to.

4. The right anchor text

Anchor text is another important factor in image SEO. If you decide to link to images with text, your anchor text can play a role in how your image is ranked for keywords. Use descriptive anchor text that describes the image. For example, linking to an image using a generic term like “image” or “photo” or a file name that doesn’t use keywords doesn’t give search engines much meaningful information on what the image is about. Linking to an image with keywords is helpful to search engines as well as people visiting your site.

5. Make sure the image matches the content

The content surrounding the image should be related to all of the things that you’ve optimized thus far: anchor tags, image url, alt tags. When these things align, it helps search engines confirm that you’re not spamming and that the image is of higher quality and relevant.

6. Don’t stuff

This goes for all kinds of SEO, but we’ll say it again just for clarity: don’t keyword stuff when filling out things like image alt text. Your alt text, captions and file names should be short and descriptive, not a long list of keywords. Remember to optimize images for your website visitors. Image SEO is as much about user experience as it is about achieving better search engine rankings.

Port US Galaxy S III ROMs to Other Variants

While Samsung may not always update every device with the urgency that we as users all crave, one thing they definitely got right was releasing the same device for multiple carriers with only minimal changes. This makes it very easy for developers and users from different carriers to work together to fix problems, develop ROMs, and have other sorts of fun. For instance, there is now a guide that walks users through the process of porting any ROM from a US variant of the Galaxy S III to any other US variant.
XDA Recognized Developer PureMotive released the tutorial, and it helps end users port both TouchWiz and AOSP-derived ROMs from one variant to the next. As the devices have strikingly similar hardware, porting ROMs requires only a few changes. As PureMotive outlines for TouchWiz ROMs:

In the ROM you want to port – delete /system/etc/apns-conf.xml
Replace the apns-conf.xml you just deleted with the one from the ROM for your carrier
Open up /system/build.prop in Notepad++
Locate every instance of d2att, d2tmo, or d2spr and replace it with d2vzw (Use CTRL+F if you have to)
Save the build.prop after all changes are made

That’s essentially all that it takes to make a ROM compatible with your device. These instructions were written specifically for porting to the Verizon variant of the Galaxy S III, but it can be used on other devices with very minor changes. Porting an AOSP-based ROM requires a little more work, but the idea is pretty much the same. Just make sure that the source ROM is from another US variant, and not from the International SGS3!

Nokia Lumia 620 comes to Thailand

While the United States is finding solid popularity in the Nokia Lumia 920, this is far from the only great Windows Phone 8 handset. One of the more “budget oriented” models that also is gaining traction as it launches across the globe is the Nokia Lumia 620.

With its attractive design, smaller size and reasonably powerful components (for a budget phone), its hard not to see why. Yesterday the phone launched in Thailand, costing Nokia Windows Phone fans just 8250 Baht ($275).

This is NOT a bad price for a phone off-contract with a dual-core processor. Personally I’d love to see these come to the United States as a carrier unlocked option for prepaid customers, I think Nokia would find quite a bit of success in that capacity.

So what kind of performance does the Nokia Lumia 620 actually bring to the table? You get a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, 3.8-inch LCD display with 800×480 resolution, 8GB internal memory, microSD, 512MB of RAM, a 5MP camera and a 1300mAh battery.

Windows Phone 8 in the Developing World

What makes the Lumia 620 so important in developing markets is that it manages to start at a reasonably affordable price point without being stuck with Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has affirmed it will continue to support Windows Phone 7 for the developing world, but let’s face it: Windows Phone 8 is where it is at.

Converting popular regional Android apps is much easier/possible with Windows Phone 8 than it was with Windows Phone 7. The operating system also just seems faster and more fluid from my experiences with it compared to WP7.

The pricing is an effective price point for those who are seeking a smartphone that will deliver performance for a low cost. To remind us of the specifications:

• 1 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor
• 3.8 inch LCD display (800 x 480) with ClearBlack technology
• 8GB internal memory expandable with microSD
• 512 MB of RAM
• 5 megapixel camera
• 1300 mAh Battery

5 Things that are In Store for SEO in 2013 and Beyond

2011 and 2012 have been incredibly important years in the world of search engine optimization and for search design trends in general. In an effort to make the web closer to something

semantic and highly responsive to the real needs of human readers, Google has performed some major overhauls to the way it ranks the websites it has indexed by its web crawlers.

These overhauls will be ongoing and will continue to develop further in 2013; creating a web popularity landscape that depends not just on classical SEO tactics but also numerous other factors involving social media, website design and friendliness to the latest browsing systems such as mobile web viewing.

Let’s go over some of these key trends that will almost certainly be really big in this new year.

1. Humanized Ranking Metrics

With Google’s repeated massively damaging blows to black hat SEO during all of 2011 and 2012, the days of effective link farming, content stuffing, keyword stuffing and other “nefarious” optimization tactics that don’t actually reflect site popularity are over. This trend will only continue and whatever black hat optimization tricks that are still working for some sites will only continue to deteriorate in their effectiveness.

Instead, Google is steadily working its way towards creating a more humanized ranking index that, in addition to reflecting other metrics which we’ll soon get to, also takes a lot of its value analysis from real time social media and human user metrics of actual popularity amongst readers.

The end result is expected to be a more “real time” search results profile for queries and an increasing amount of weight given to data collected from Twitter, Facebook, other social platforms and, of course, Google’s own array of social media tools. An important aspect of this will involve site owners connecting their content to each of these social platforms and also integrating themselves more with Google’s own network of content tracking. (despite the obvious bias in Google’s favor here)

2. Quality over Quantity

This almost certain 2013 trend is great news for a lot of content weary bloggers and site owners. Instead of giving heavy emphasis to massively content stuffed websites, Google and other search engines will continue to focus more on ensuring that their best ranked content is judged more by its quality, relevancy and freshness.

Updates like some of Panda’s iterations were a particularly good demonstration of this and played a part in giving precedence to sites whose content was most relevant and valuable for a given search, even if the sites themselves were not major content producers like some competitors might have been.

Based on this trend, site administrators should work towards really filling information needs with high quality posts without rushing to fill out as much new content as they can as quickly as possible.

3. Mobile Search

The mobile browsing landscape is only continuing to grow and soon it will completely overtake conventional web search. This means that adapting to the technical and practical details of this changing environment is a crucial step for SEO conscious site owners in 2013.

Speaking on a purely technical level, more emphasis has to be given to making websites more mobile friendly and designing them so that they are fully responsive not only to different PC browsers and screen sizes but also to thousands of different mobile platforms, from tablets to a whole array of smart phone types and operating systems.

Additionally, from other optimization standpoints, work to get your sites and their content more oriented towards mobile friendly content delivery. This could mean post design, text layout and presentation media such as video or audio

Another interesting feature of this emerging mobile search trend is the fact that a lot more of it takes place through a complex series of social network connections, bringing us to our next point.

4. Increasing Social Media Importance

We already partly covered the incredible importance of social media weight in our first major trend point, but it bears mentioning in more detail.

In 2013, you will absolutely need to develop your website’s social platform presence and integration as much as possible.

As more and more of the data about what’s trending on their platforms gets collected by social media sites, more of it will also become available for review by Google. This in turn will make such metrics more important in deciding search rank value. Ultimately Google is working to provide the most human relevant search experience possible to its users and the fundamentally human guided nature of social media popularity makes it a vital base of information for Google to achieve its goal.

Help this process along as much as possible by developing your popularity in the social media platforms and building up a base of dedicated fans that keep coming back to and repeatedly sharing what you have to offer further down the social chain. Not only will this eventually improve your essential human ranking value in the new search landscape, it will also achieve the vital site popularity building step of making you less dependent on search rank and SEO for the long run.

In essence, by developing a fan base at least partly through your social presence, you’ll be forcing the search engines to pay attention to you. Another way of looking at this is that building a deep human popularity amongst many fans and other influential websites will create a domain authority for your pages that no search engine can ignore.

Additionally, bear in mind practical technical steps that will improve your social media friendliness; things like creating multiple profiles across several popular media platforms, connecting them fully to your website through social media buttons and making it easy for people to log on through their Facebook or other social networking accounts.

5. Conversion Rate Optimization

However Google works, it has to also pay attention to reality on the digital ground. In terms of CRO, this has an enormous potential importance for 2013 because it means that a major factor in higher ranking may soon be how well sites get visitors to perform useful actions.

In essence, while many sites may have numerous visitors, the ones that optimize their pages for the best human engagement are those that actually get the readers not only to visit but also do things like buy products, click more links or opt in to a mailing list with their email addresses.

Since successfully doing all this is an obvious indicator that people are getting real personal value from a website, it’s very likely that Google will pay more attention to it in 2013.

For your own site, focus as much as possible on delivering high quality and getting maximal action or purchase conversion rates from whatever visitors you do have. Doing this is even more important than focusing on raw visitor numbers.

The iPhone 5S will launch in June and have a built-in fingerprint sensor

We’ve heard all kinds of crazy rumors about the next-generation iPhone so far, some being more believable than others. Reports have claimed that the iPhone 5S could launch as early as next June, while others have suggested that the next iPhone could finally have NFC built in. Now, an analyst is claiming that the iPhone 5S will pack a built-in fingerprint sensor, and will launch alongside a cheaper iPhone model…
Frankly, I’ve pretty much had it with these so-called “analysts”. There have been tons of highly unlikely predictions, so your guess is probably as good as theirs. Nonetheless, this specific rumor does come from Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI Securities, who’s made some correct predictions on Apple launches in the past.
Apple bought out AuthenTec last year, which is a company that specializes in fingerprint sensors. The Cupertino company also came to an agreement with biometric security company Microlatch in 2012. Thus, Apple may indeed be working to integrate biometric security into our beloved idevices, but considering the fact that these deals happened only late last year, I doubt that we’ll see this feature on the iPhone 5S. As much as I’d love to see it come with the next-gen iPhone, the iPhone 6 seems more likely.
Kuo also predicts that the next iPhone will come with an improved camera and A7 chip – which are pretty obvious guesses.


According to the analyst, Apple is also set to launch a cheaper, plastic iPhone model alongside the iPhone 5S. Despite Phil Schiller specifically stating that Apple would not jump into the cheaper smartphone market, reports continue to come out that suggest Apple will in fact launch a cheaper iPhone. This rumored model will supposedly have the same design as the current iPhone 5, but will come in multiple colors. It is also rumored to retail around $99 to $149.
If Kuo’s predictions hold any truth to them, both devices will be announced in June or July.

Angry Birds Rio and Angry Birds Rio HD now free for a limited time on the App Store

If you haven’t already slung some heated birds at their enemies in Rio, you’re definitely missing out. But no need to fret, as Rovio has just made their wildly popular Angry Birds Rio game completely free for a limited time!

You can now head over to the App Store and download the addictive little game for both the iPhone and iPad absolutely free. We wont go into explaining what the game is; we’re sure you already know. So head inside for the download links!

You can grab Angry Birds Rio for the iPhone and Rio HD for the iPad from the App Store completely free.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or add us to your circles on Google+ to be the first to hear about breaking iPhone news, tips, hacks, and more!

United To Offer Wi-Fi On Flights

United Airlines has installed Panasonic Avionics Corporation's Ku-band satellite technology on some of its wide-body aircraft in order to provide Wi-Fi Internet service to passengers. Internet service will first be offered on long-haul flights, followed later this year on shorter flights.

 

The first planes to get the satellite Internet service are Boeing 747s, which are used to cross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and two Airbus 319s, which are used for some cross-country domestic routes. United said it should have the satellite-based Wi-Fi service available on about 300 planes by the end of the year. This includes its Boeing 737, 757, 767, 777, and 787 aircraft. (The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is not expected to enter service for United until the third quarter.)

United will offer the Wi-Fi service to passengers at a range of price points. Interestingly, the airline will offer two different speeds, though it hasn't specified exactly what those speeds will be. The slower service will cost between $3.99 and $14.99 and faster service will cost between $5.99 and $19.99 per flight, depending on the duration. United pointed out that both ranges are initial prices and noted that they may evolve over time.

The Ku-band satellite-based service offers faster data speeds than some competing air-to-ground services, such as GoGo. Before it merged with Continental, United offered GoGo on some of its long-haul, cross-country flights. Continental, however, never offered Wi-Fi Internet service to passengers.

GoGo, which is run by Aircell, uses land-based towers to communicate with aircraft as they fly overhead. The service is used by a wide range of air carriers, including American Airlines and Delta Airlines.

"Satellite-based Wi-Fi service enables us to better serve our customers and offer them more of what they want in a global airline," said Jim Compton, vice chairman and chief revenue officer at United. "With this new service, we continue to build the airline that customers want to fly."

The service will allow passengers to use their smartphones, tablets, netbooks and laptops while in the air. They'll be able to browse the Internet, upload and download files, and use instant messenger systems. Tools such as VoIP calling will likely not be supported.

United has yet to specify exactly when the service will become available.