Q and A: Do search engines recognize words that are in a graphic?

QuestionDear Kalena…

Do search engines recognize words that are in a graphic? My home page is loaded with graphics and I have been told that search engines cannot read them. Is that true? I am about to have my home page rebuilt and I don’t want to spend the money if I don’t have to.

Al

View my video answer below:

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Lost in Translation

I’m signed up to receive Google Alerts whenever a new web page gets indexed by Google that contains a reference to Search Engine College.

It’s a great service and I often find spam blogs and sites that have scraped entire pages from our site so I can report them quite easily. But today I came across quite an amusing blog post that has obviously been translated into English by either very poor quality translation software (maybe Babel Fish?) or by someone whose grasp of English is pretty rudimentary.

Check out the highlights:

For those people who are not that computing machine literate person and are not up on the up-to-the-minute computing machine jargon, where are they going to travel to acquire their necessary cognition about SEO? One illustration is through Search Engine College. Their chief end is to offer easy, merriment and low-cost courses of study in not only hunt engine optimisation but in other hunt engine selling topics as well.

Does this mean we have to replace SEO (search engine optimization) with HEO (hunt engine optimization)? *chuckle*

Q and A: Are Geo Tags worth using for search engines?

QuestionDear Kalena…

I just came across ‘Geo Tags’ that allow you to identify the geographical location of your business. I’d like to incorporate them on our local office pages like Boston, Charlotte, Houston, etc.

[meta name=”geo.position” content=”35.2287 -80.8458 “]
[meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-NC”]
[meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Charlotte”]

Is this worth doing? What do you think?

Kelly

Dear Kelly

I’ve done a bit of research into geo tags and it appears that Google is now supporting geo-tags for Google Earth.

Google has also added geo-tagging ability to YouTube videos, so the location functionality is obviously part of their algorithm now. In addition, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search all now support GeoRSS. GeoRSS is a format that extends RSS by adding location data using Google Maps and the Google Maps API.

So yes, I would say go ahead and add them to your pages. The code additions are fairly small so they shouldn’t bloat the code too much.

Christmas Discount at Search Engine College

It’s no secret that the courses at Search Engine College are hugely popular. Our students consist of people from all walks of life, including webmasters trying to learn search engine marketing skills to help promote their small businesses, marketing staff at advertising and web design agencies and existing search engine marketing professionals keen to obtain formal certification to help advance their career.

2007 saw us reach the significant milestone of having students enrolled in 30 countries. Our massive growth has resulted in more work for our tutors and administrative staff and also prompted the need to hire more staff. As a result, we will be increasing the cost of our courses early in 2008.

So if you have been thinking about enrolling at Search Engine College but just haven’t gotten around to it yet, December will be your last chance to enroll at our current prices. You’ll have 12 months to complete your course from when you first enter our online classroom, so even if you don’t think you have time to study right now, you can enroll at 2007 prices and study whenever you have time in 2008.

Not only that, but if you enroll from this page, you can snap up one of our individual certification courses for $50 off the regular retail price. What the heck, it’s the holidays, right?

But this discount is only available until midnight Dec 31 and you must buy from the link above and choose the coupon code SECMEMBER from the drop-down list as instructed.

Happy Studying!

Q and A: How many links is too many in the eyes of Google?

QuestionDear Kalena…

We are willing to give backlinks from our website to a website of one of the universities, but we are worried to be considered as spammers or selling links by Google as we will be giving them the links in all pages. How many links per week can be reasonable to be given to this website? Are we making a risk by giving them a large number of links even if it was on intervals?

Regards
Mais

Dear Mais

If you are giving them links that pass PageRank (e.g. not using NoFollow), then I would keep the number of links to a minimum. If money has exchanged hands for the link, you’re better off putting NoFollow tags on the links, particularly if there is no direct correlation between the content on your site and the content on the university site.

I recommend you read this post and this one for clarification.