Optimizing Websites With Minimal Text

It is often a preference of the designer to use very little text on a website, but is it possible to achieve good rankings for those pages in search engines’ The answer is yes, but you should follow the guidelines outlined in this document if you wish to succeed.Firstly, let’s look at some facts. Images are slower to load that text, which may lead to your low-band visitors becoming somewhat agitated. There is also the issue of increased bandwidth from the server, which might lead to higher costs in terms of web hosting. If both of these issues are not a problem for you then continue, but so far they alone have been enough to put me off moving to a image only website.

First thing to realize before optimizing is that by having very little text on the page, you will find it harder to rank better, and if you’re in a very competitive market, then I highly advise that you opt to have at least some text on the website.

After you have designed the web page and layout, the first thing to do is ensure that your images/media content is as compressed (in file size) as possible. I personally recommend the XAT.com image optimizer for shaving the bytes off of images, both GIF (non-animated) and JPG. This will be important for many reasons, it will decrease both download time and bandwidth, it’s really a double win situation. The only further advise on this that you should ensure you don’t decrease the image so much that its quality becomes seriously compromised, otherwise your website will look cheap!!


Taking A Look Around
Next step, and you’re not going to like this, is to look around the page(s) and see if there is anything that can possibly be turned into text. If for example you have an image that says “Click Here For ….” then experiment with that same link in a text format if at all possible, the reason I bring this to light is that you’ll want to balance out the source code / visible text ratio as much as possible, and every little helps! There are attractive ways to use text, so for gods sake utilize them whenever you can.

Next is to focus on the optimized images, we’re going to add some of those very special attributes called the ALT and TITLE. You are probably already familiar with the use of the alt tag (at least I hope you are), and if not, well then here is a sample HTML code of an image with the ALT attribute:

You can find more detailed information about the ALT attribute here. Then you can do the very same with the TITLE attribute, so a sample of code would be:

The purpose of using the TITLE & ALT tag is simply to reinforce the keywords, and although neither of them carry very significant weight, with very little text on the page, they will be of great importance. As for what you should put into these tags, well the wisest choice is some keywords, although they are normally only to be used in order to describe the item to which they are assigned.

For example, if you had an image of a very beautiful lady standing near a red Ferrari, then you could use the ALT tag of “A Very Beautiful Lady Standing Near An Even More Beautiful Car”.

Playing Tag
The next step is to use some comment tags. These are easily created and can be filled with keywords, although please understand then I’ve not said spammed with keywords. My suggestion is to have no more than 4 comment tags on any page, each with no more than 100 characters per tag. A comment tag

looks like this in HTML:

Ensure these comment tags are inserted inside the tags and not inside the tags. The next step is to create your meta tags, if you haven’t already done so. Let me explain a little about how these work. The keywords tag is an old method used to allow search engines / robots to determine the keywords for the given page (very easy). The description tag is the old way that search engines used to give a good description to searchers for a given page. Neither of these tags carry a vast amount of weight anymore, in saying that, some search engines (such as Altavista & All The Web) still use them effectively.

Your tags should be in the form of description first, then keywords, which will yield a result similar to:

The keywords tag should be no longer than 255 characters, and the description tag no longer than 128 characters, both should be placed underneath the TITLE tag inside of the head. The Title tag is one of the most important items, and should be utilized perfectly. Your Title tag must be no longer than 60 characters and should contain your most targeted keywords. So, your complete tag should look similar to:

Notice that I highly recommend NOT using only uppercase letters in the head tag, as this might get flagged as spam by some of the search engines, also it is rather difficult to read.

Follow Through
After you have carefully placed your keywords in all of the tags, the only thing left to do is go through your HTML code and delete white spaces, yes, you heard me correctly, delete any white spaces that don’t need to be there, this will minimize file size, compressing those precious few lightly

weighted keywords!!

There are probably other on-page things that you can do, but none of them will prove greatly effective unless Google has some visible text to compare them to. The next step is to get as many inbound links as possible, although this is the technique is all fields of optimization, it will especially apply to image / rich media sites with little text. The trick is to ensure that of all the links pointing back your site site, they all contain your main keywords.

By Darrin Ward
http://www.seochat.com