When it comes to website optimization, images are sometimes an afterthought. Copy, design, and coding all play important roles in an optimized website, but images can also increase your visibility in image based searches. Optimizing images is easy do if you follow these best practice guidelines:

Utilize image compression and file type: Maintaining fast load times is important for an optimized website. If your site is using lots of image data, you’ll need to compress the images to keep them from affecting your site’s performance. You should also consider which file extension your images use. For example, a .png file can show more colors than a .jpg file, but it’s larger and will take longer to load.

Create an image sitemap: To increase the chances that search engines will index the images on your website, create an image sitemap.

Don’t forget social sharing buttons: The advent of image sharing sites like Pinterest has only increased the importance of sharing buttons, especially for images. By adding social sharing buttons, you’ll increase the chance that web pages and images reach a wider audience.

Optimize image metadata: Most importantly, you should optimize the file name and alt tag. For both, use five to seven words to describe what the image is. If possible, use keywords that you’d like to target. If the image contains text, include this text in the alt data as well.

Major algorithm updates from Google are rarely disregarded. However in a year full of panda’s and penguins there has been little ado about the Google Venice Update. If you are a local business owner, the Venice update can help provide a bigger spotlight on your website or social media channel. This update occurred on February 27, 2012 and fundamentally changed localized search. According to Google’s search quality highlights:

“Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename "Venice"] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.”

“Improved local results. We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.”

Google will now return localized results for broad match keywords if they determine that it would be beneficial to the user. No longer are local keywords required to return localized search results. What this means is that if Google’s algorithms determine that a broad match search for a non-localized keyword such as “SEO” should return local results to the user, they will do just that. This is accomplished when Google “auto-detects” your location by using your IP address. This does not require your consent and will even occur when conducting a browser session in the “incognito” window.

You can see your location setting by simply performing a search in Google, then looking on the left hand side of the results page under the navigation. If you see your current city and state, Google has “auto-detected” your location through your IP address and will return more localized results as opposed to when your location is set more broadly such as to “United States.”

The Venice update can provide local businesses more impressions to local searchers who were not necessarily thinking about local businesses. It is more important than ever to not only have a strong presence on the web but also to have a strong presence in search. There are many channels through which you can accomplish this, and some great resources can be found on our blog under local search.

The “Penguin” algorithm update from Google has certainly taken web spammers down a peg (or SERP ranking) by dishing out penalties for things like overused anchor text and duplicate content. However, it’s not just nefarious websites receiving a penalty. Many well-meaning companies can have spam elements on their site specifically targeted by Penguin. In many cases, these problem areas of a website are a matter of taking some shortcuts with content development. But, there are no shortcuts in quality SEO! If you’re concerned about Penguin penalizing your site, devote some time to these areas:

Titles – To be effective for both user experience and SEO, title tags need to be informative and descriptive. Google has only gotten more critical of title tags – often changing them entirely when a page ranks for certain search results. The title tag is not the place to cram keywords and branding – exactly the kind of thing Penguin is frowning upon. Make sure your titles are true to the theme of their respective pages.

Internal Links – Out of all SEO elements, internal links have probably drawn the most ire of Penguin. When building site content [http://www.morevisibility.com/services-seo-copywriting.php], you are totally in charge of what pages to link to and what anchor text to use. It’s all too easy and tempting to over-link to certain pages and/or continuously use the same anchor text – often a perfectly optimized keyphrase. The same goes for giant page footers filled with internal site links. Overdoing this type of optimization will raise a red flag. Include variety by blending synonyms for your keywords and calls to action in your anchor text.

Back Links – While you have less control over your back links, you should be discerning about them when you can. For your company link building efforts, shoot for variety (with different types of sites, content, and anchor text) and quality (by creating original content for sites that are reputable and relevant to your business).

Content Layout – Of course, your site should be content rich. But when you start repeating yourself, you’re treading on thin ice. Two pages meant to target slightly different versions of the same keyphrase are not helpful to the user and could be flagged by Penguin as being duplicative. Read through your site and ask yourself whether a page really provides new and useful information, or if it just retreads information from another page of your site.