Don't want to stray into keyword stuffing but....

[Deleted member 74679]

Let's say (for the sake of illustration) I have a single product website selling a new type of folding ladder. I've researched the keyword ''folding ladder' and the searches vs. competition looks good. There are no other keywords in the field of folding ladders that it is worth targetting. I would therefore like to optimise my website for the term folding ladder.

The website has 10 pages in total and each page features an image showing a different feature of the folding ladder - the folding ladder safety catch, a decorator using the folding ladder etc. In terms of the on-page text, the plan is to only have one or two occurances of 'folding ladder' per page, to maintain optimal readability/user experience. The page titles, meta-description, headings etc will be optimised for 'folding ladder' where appropriate. My question is what should I do with the image filenames and alt tags? As every image is of a folding ladder, in theory it's entirely appropriate and reasonable for every image filename and alt tag to include the keyword 'folding ladder'. But would the search engines think that I am trying to keyword stuff and penalise me for this - how can they know the difference between a site that is genuinely and soley about 'folding ladders' and one which is using keyword stufffing just to get higher up the rankings?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[SEO Lady]

I think it's a great idea to use your alt tags as additional ways to read 'folding ladder' as long as the text you write reads well to a visitor, you will be fine.

It sounds as if you have done some good research - you are well aware of the implications regarding keyword stuffing.

Remember to get your site verified in Google (and Yahoo / Bing) and in Google Places and add to Hotfrog and Freeindex to kick off some backlinks. There is also a thread about Brownbook this week which has had positive reviews.

Good luck!

 

[estwig]

You don't want every page of your website optimised for folding ladder, save that for the home page. You need to find relevant keywords, then optimise individual pages for things like, folding ladder mechanism, what are folding ladders made from, how much do folding ladders cost, cheap folding ladders, quality folding ladders, etc.

Google sees each page of your website separately, it doesn't really rank websites, it ranks pages.

Then your alt tags and image file names, will correspond with what is on each page. So the page about folding ladder mechanisms, will have a picture of a folding ladder mechanism.

 

[MASSEY]

saving images as key words does not help. Havhmg 10 pages with the same key word aim is gonna be difficult. you will probably confus the engines if content on each page is too similar. And you cant really rely on alt text to rank, you will need the term in your body text at least.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

You appear to be straying into shark infested waters, believe you have to go there, and are looking for a shark suit.

Step back a second, and explain to me

folding ladders
folding ladders
folding ladders
folding ladders
folding ladders

that is effectively what your site is saying.

This raises the question how many pages do you need?

Adding pages for the sake of it isn't ideal as it can in fact be counter productive. your images need to be clear, they need to say exactly what is in the image man up ladder fixing Satellite dish. the fact it is a folding ladder isn't of relevance. If you cram the single phrase everywhere without using proper semantic language, then you are building a one legged horse, and long term your rankings will suffer.

 

[Deleted member 74679]

Thank you everyone!

But I have invented a new folding ladder (I haven't really, it's a childrens product but let's continue the example!)

The 9 pages on my single-product website are

Home
Features (of folding ladder)
Green credentials (of folding ladder)
360 degree spin (of folding ladder)
about me (inc. how I developed the folding ladder)
customer/press reviews (of folding ladder)
Buy/T&Cs/Delivery (of folding ladder)
Contact me (for wholesale folding ladder)

So to me, it's perfectly appropriate for my website to be optimised for the term 'folding ladder' and I want to capture some of the 1200 people a month searching for 'folding ladder'. I need to know where to draw the line - as stated in my original post I'm not interested in spamming my text with keywords - I have decided that having 'folding ladder' once or twice per page is optimal for readability (I've tried to follow everything I've read on here in the past!) I'm told that I should put keywords in the page titles (tick), meta description (tick), headings if appropriate (tick). I want to know what to do about image filenames (some conflicting advice here already!) and image alt tags. If you guys think I should de-optimise my websitefor the search term I'm interested in, in order to optimise it, I'm happy to do that!

Reagarding the suggestion to optimise for other terms such as 'cheap folding ladders' 'mechanism of folding ladder' 'what are folding ladders made of' I understand the benefits (will capture even more searches) but surely as thes phrases still contain the words 'folding ladder' I will still be optimising/penalising(?) for this keyword I follow this advice?

Apologies in advance that I'm probably being very thick and really annoying, but I'm just really confused!

PS. If you want to see my website, which is currently optimised for nothing except for my brand name, do a search on my UKBF username

 

[paulus]

So to me, it's perfectly appropriate for my website to be optimised for the term 'folding ladder' and I want to capture some of the 1200 people a month searching for 'folding ladder'.

Ideally you won't be optimising your site for "folding ladder", you'll be optimising one page (as suggested earlier). The other pages will target subsidiary phrases like the ones you mention.

Yes, the phrase "folding ladder" may appear within places of significance (titles, headings etc) on other pages, but they will be targeting phrases like "benefits of a folding ladder".

 

Let's say (for the sake of illustration) I have a single product website selling a new type of folding ladder. I've researched the keyword ''folding ladder' and the searches vs. competition looks good. There are no other keywords in the field of folding ladders that it is worth targetting. I would therefore like to optimise my website for the term folding ladder.

The website has 10 pages in total and each page features an image showing a different feature of the folding ladder - the folding ladder safety catch, a decorator using the folding ladder etc. In terms of the on-page text, the plan is to only have one or two occurances of 'folding ladder' per page, to maintain optimal readability/user experience. The page titles, meta-description, headings etc will be optimised for 'folding ladder' where appropriate. My question is what should I do with the image filenames and alt tags? As every image is of a folding ladder, in theory it's entirely appropriate and reasonable for every image filename and alt tag to include the keyword 'folding ladder'. But would the search engines think that I am trying to keyword stuff and penalise me for this - how can they know the difference between a site that is genuinely and soley about 'folding ladders' and one which is using keyword stufffing just to get higher up the rankings?

Many thanks in advance!

Don't forget the synonyms:-

http://thesaurus.yourdictionary.com/ladder

Earl

 

[Tin]

saving images as key words does not help.

It makes sense to keyword images both from a housekeeping/management aspect and there's also the additional benefit that the image may get highly ranked on Google images, folding-ladder.jpg makes more sense than, untitled1.jpg.

you will probably confus the engines if content on each page is too similar.

Confuse the engines. Not really, they'll simply drop ones that don't count.

And you cant really rely on alt text to rank, you will need the term in your body text at least.

Complete nonsense. I suggest you apply some thought and run some tests on this one as it's perfectly doable (I know as I've done it numerous times) without the actual keywords appearing in the body copy.

 

[fisicx]

The 9 pages on my single-product website are....

Only one page out of these 9 are of any use - and that's the one which sells the folding ladder. All the others are supporting bumpf and are only really useful if I want find out more (which is unlikely).

Concentrate all your efforts on the converting page, put the testimonials on this page, put all the images on this page and put the contact details on this page.

But back to your original question, create the image names and alt text and captions for your visitors. This means properly describing the image:

filename: stored-folding-ladder.jpg.
alt text: Stored folding ladder
caption: The ladder folder for storage.

 

[paulus]

And you cant really rely on alt text to rank, you will need the term in your body text at least.

Complete nonsense. I suggest you apply some thought and run some tests on this one as it's perfectly doable (I know as I've done it numerous times) without the actual keywords appearing in the body copy.

That you can rank for terms that appear only in alt attributes doesn't mean it's a good idea for the OP to omit them from their textual content.

I think including in your content the terms you're trying to rank for is good advice.

 

[MASSEY]

Hi Ray, ;-). It makes sense for house keeping reasons, but the op seems to be giving naming images with key words more credit / thought than it deserves in my opinion. I had an experience where content was similar on 2 seperate pages merely for targeting different areas and google dropped the wrong one. Alt is not supposed to be keyword stuffed is it but on reflection i would say im over looking its SMALL use.

 

[Tin]

Why the emphasis on the word small? Is that because you don't understand it's full potential?

Agreed, the alt shouldn't be keyword stuffed but I wasn't suggesting it should, merely saying (contrary to your opinion which was "you cant really rely on alt text to rank") that alt's can be put to really good use depending on the role the image is used for, the nature of content elsewhere on the site and the targeted keywords. Nothing more, nothing less

 

[Tin]

That you can rank for terms that appear only in alt attributes doesn't mean it's a good idea for the OP to omit them from their textual content.

Correct it doesn't, it's much better to have those words in the copy too but there could easily be genuine reasons why the site owner doesn't want to have those keywords mentioned in the copy. One site I've worked on in this respect was a site which contained a single home page graphic which simply had "enter" on the image - zero text on the page. Despite my thoughts about introducing copy to the page the owner wouldn't budge on the topic.

On another site I've worked on the owner had (in his mind) sufficient copy for his purposes on the home page and resisted all suggestions to add a bit more to help broaden the keyword targets for that page. It had copy on it, just very limited and certainly nowhere near enough to contain all the targeted terms that page was targeting. In both cases, the alt text played an important part in rankings.

 

[Deleted member 74679]

Correct it doesn't, it's much better to have those words in the copy too but there could easily be genuine reasons why the site owner doesn't want to have those keywords mentioned in the copy. .

I realise things have moved on and you are all talking generally, and not about me (sob!), but I will reiterate that I do intend to use the keywords in the copy - it's just I've heeded all the advice I've read on here over the months that I should focus on good, well-written, customer-optimised content rather than getting hung up about SEO, and that gives me approx 1 or 2 uses of each keyword per page.

The images are a different issue, as (naturally) every image shows a folding ladder. To give an unbiased objective representation of each image, the keyword 'folding ladder' would probably appear somewhere in each filename/alt tag so I wanted to know if I would be penalised for doing that.

 

[paulus]

The images are a different issue, as (naturally) every image shows a folding ladder. To give an unbiased objective representation of each image, the keyword 'folding ladder' would probably appear somewhere in each filename/alt tag so I wanted to know if I would be penalised for doing that.

No, you won't be.

 

[fisicx]

Nope, you be fine.

But I'd put as much of the content on the converting page as possible. If you have the images and testimonials and contact details all on one page then the chances of conversion increase. It's something I've been experimenting with and longer scrolling pages with lots of great content do better than spreading it out over lots of pages. In other words, use the other pages to support the converting page not spread the content out over lots of pages.

 

[Deleted member 74679]

oh, and if anyone is wondering why, if my website is all about folding ladders, it's not naturally and organically already optimised for folding ladders, the answer is that I developed the website as a ingnoramus without having heard of SEO. I called my invention 'bifold ladder' and then discovered no one is searching for bifold ladder, but 1200 a month are searching for 'folding ladder', which is technically what my product is.

 

[MASSEY]

Why the emphasis on the word small? Is that because you don't understand it's full potential?

Quite possibly :redface: