Writing Copy to Convince Google to Rank Your Site

This blog is one of a series, each one giving you some ideas as to how to write copy if you want Google to rank your pages.

Each one covers a different topic, but in essence they are all about the same thing, making sure that your page includes the 'key phrases' you want your site to be found for. It really is as simple as that, include the words in the right way (and make sure you have enough links) and your site will be ranked (although of course in cases of incredible competition, it might not be ranked as high as you would like - more on another time).

The subject of today's blog is how you can add copy to a site that is mostly images, or at least where images are as important as the words. This scenario is very common on E-commerce sites, these having pictures of the goods, and sometimes just pictures.

As the Search Engine's spiders cannot read images they only have the ALT tag (Alternate Text Tag - used in the old days when the internet was so slow that people switched off images, the ALT tag then telling them the image was 'A picture of a dog') and the file name of the image,which is often something like image05.jpg, which of course tells them nothing - see our forthcoming blog on getting listed for Google's Image search.

So with many image laden sites, the Engines have little to go on and thus don't know what to list the site for. The trick is to add text of course, but how, when images are the real message?

There are three main tricks here:-

1. Make sure you add some words to the top of the visible page and if possible use the H1 / H2 tags to 'tell' the engines what the page contains.
   
   
2. Try to add some text to describe each image, and make sure that the link to it's page (presuming it has a page of it's own) is keyword rich. Use Header tags (H3 perhaps) here if you can (but don't overload the page, instead use Bold/Strong in the description somewhere.
   
   
3. Add text below the fold (this refers to the fact that in most cases, only the top half of a page will be shown on a user's browser until they scroll down) as this will not be seen at first by the user, but will always be picked up by the engines. This area can be as long as you want and thus all those keywords that you want to be found for can be included here. Just remember that you should never 'shout' too many words at the engines as this ends up sounding like 'rhubarb' !

More on writing to impress the Search Engines tomorrow.