Use alt tags to improve your web pages’ SEO quality. Your images can be sitting there lifeless, yet with the addition of a few keywords, they can bring in new search traffic to your site.
The best keywords to use are related ones that you could not work into the original text. In addition, your images can link back to other relevant pages within your website, boosting their visibility as well. Once searchers have come to your site via alt tag keywords, they will be drawn in by the additional available links.
26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
It helps every so often to repeat that designing a site for optimized search results means keeping the design clean and simple. Here’s another blog post making that point. Nothing fancy, limited graphics, attention to content. Insuring that keywords reflect content on each page. (Consider them virtually as separate pages for seo purposes.)
“Search engine optimization at its heart is simple and clean. Don’t worry so much about the scary technical stuff if you’re just starting out. Start slowly, read, learn, read some more. Most of all, be patient with yourself. Learning search engine optimization takes time, just like any other subject.”…
Here, from Resource Nation, are ten more tips for website design for legitimate SEO benefits. 
Jennifer Laycock on Search Engine Guide refers us to advice by Greg Myers on SEMGeek.com that a website redesign be tested via paid search. Myers suggests setting a pay-per-click budget aside to test the effectiveness of keywords and other aspects of a site. His piece doesn’t take long to read, and may interest you.
Pleased with your new website? Spent a lot of time designing it and getting it built? Time to move on to other things? Yes, and no. Designing and maintaining a website for access by search engines is a never-ending process. If you want to improve your rankings on the search engines – keep attracting their relentless Web-crawling spiders – website maintenance is never done. 
It’s a continuous process of accessing results with given keywords, making adjustments and checking again: a systematic cycle of search engine, spider-crawling tuning. It’s fun, but never-ending. Don’t put up a site and leave it as…
Getting good mileage from the keywords on your website pages is a core principle of effective design for being noticed by search engines. How do you know what keywords have the most currency? That is, how often do searchers use given words or phrases? Two tools for checking on the frequency with which keywords (and, if you’re lucky, synonyms) are used are: Google’s Keyword Tool and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool.
So, most definitely, plan and write your site with keywords in mind for each page.
A prime principle in Web design for search engine optimization is that each page in a website should be, in effect, its own site. That is, pages beyond your home page should have their own title tags and include keywords optimized for the contents of that page, not the site overall.
For search engines, be wary of website design templates. Here’s a commentary noting that “One common mistake made when working with title tag(s) is that a websitge is created from a template in which all of the title tag information is the same from page to page. This can not only…
Jeff Cotrupe, Founder and CEO
One of my favorite comedy lines ever, which in this case emanated from the magically twisted mind of Steven Wright, goes like this: “I bought some batteries. But they weren’t included. So I bought ‘em again…I bought some powdered water. But I didn’t know what to add…”
Open letter to Steven and ROW (rest of world): When it comes to websites, I can tell you exactly what to add.
It’s always a good idea to keep your keywords and metatags complete and current on a website; many search engines still key on that when deciding whether to list you in search…
Good advice on how to tell ethical from unethical search marketing firms from Mike Moran and Bill Hunt in Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Second Edition. Rather than boost your site, a glib operator, or spammer, can actually get it banned from search engines. 
In search marketing, “spam,” explain Moran and Hunt, is “any technique that is designed mainly to fool the search engines to gain an untoward advantage:”
• Be wary of firms that guarantee high rankings. “No reputable firms will promise you top results–too many variables are out of their control.”
• Be wary of firms that promise that top rankings require only…
