If it wasn’t enough difficult to rank on the first page of Google, with all the competition, universal search includes. Now, Google is even showing less results on some search result pages. Normally, the first 10 results on any search query are already competitive. Most SEO’s will know how the click distribution on average is allocated to the different positions, with the majority going to the top 10. With less results on the first page, it will become even more difficult to get any traffic on relevant pages if you are not the brand owner, Wikipedia or Google.
Below you see a SERP for Zhu Zhu Pets on Google.nl, where the first page only has 8 real results. The page with 8 results looks so short… There is something missing!
I’m going to test some fancy html tagclouds for SEO purposes. Right now, links are in the form of image maps to link to popular products, but anchor text rich links should make a difference, especially when the page is linked from the homepage!
I don’t always figure out how you can optimize for Google Image search. I used to get a decent amount of traffic on my Dutch blog for keywords White Shark (witte haai) or White Sharks (witte haaien). All that traffic was generated through image search.
After the traffic had dropped, I though there might have been less interest in the white shark. The image that I was ranking for was the following image of a white shark jumping out of the water:
I used to appear on the very first spot in image search, and on the top of the normal search, even above the text results. Nowdays, the same image is still there, but it is hosted and taken from another site. They copied the image from my blog and pasted it into theirs. Even the watermark is still there!
Now the question is, how does Google rank images. As it is the same image as before, the one taken from the post: Witte Haaien in het Zwembad. I wonder if they take the most recent image that was published and update their rankings on recency?
So a little test is underway; I wonder if my original post, or either this one will rank back on the position #1 for White Sharks.
As an in-house SEO I always have work in training and explaining SEO to other folks in the company. We usually try to use existing examples of our own site how we rank, how the pages are displayed and how we can improve.
Explaining how the Page Title Tag, the Meta Description and the URL can have a big influence on the rankings and if the result is inspiring to click on is sometimes a challenge.
But today I found a perfect example of how you can simply explain it through an image:
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For a while now I’ve been mailing and tweeting with Joost de Valk, a fellow SEO from The Netherlands. And although we never met, we had no problem sharing ideas and thoughts on Internet Marketing. Last Friday, while I was in Amsterdam, we went for a coffee and for a chat.
Joost is [...]
