Hello...glad that I've found this great forum !!!!! :-p
I am a very very beginner with html ( i work with dw8)
I have a problem ....
I read that putting alt text ( in my case to pictures) helps search engines.
So I have a HTML page with 10 images and a bit of text, the rest is a flash site.
I did put the alt text everywhere I could, but still after 2 months on the web, I cant find my images or anything else with any of the search engines.
I keyworded, but I am sure that i do sthing wrong. Could sbdy guide me ?
Thanks

What kind of images? Does the page have a TITLE? Are any pages linking to the page?

hi beu
well, images are jpgs
yes the page has a title...
I have a few outside links...
I just made a check with a free meta tag analyser and the tags are appearing...the result of the analysis just mention that
"..for best results try to name them after your primary keywords.."
does it mean that the tags are not well placed in my script ??

hi beu
well, images are jpgs
yes the page has a title...
I have a few outside links...
I just made a check with a free meta tag analyser and the tags are appearing...the result of the analysis just mention that
"..for best results try to name them after your primary keywords.."
does it mean that the tags are not well placed in my script ??

Hi itsme and welcome to SEW!

Not sure just yet but, try going to Google and searching for site:searchenginewatch.com (replace "searchenginewatch.com" with your URL). How many pages are indexed?

Could your images be considered "Adult content"?

Do you have Google's Free analytics on your site?

So I have a HTML page with 10 images and a bit of text, the rest is a flash site.
While search engines talk all they want about being able to index this format and that format, they still mostly rely on surrounding text for indexing images. For images, TITLE or ALT elements appear to work halfway well. Flash pages? Really have no idea on how to optimize them, maybe somebody else will show up with some techniques.

FOR BEU
No no adult content...travel photography.
2 pages are indexed : index.html and the inside link to a swf( flash content).
The images I want to appear in search engines are the ones on the index.html.
By google free analytics, do you mean the webmaster tools that Google offers. If so, then yes, I have it.
I cleant my code yesterday with the meta tag analyser , I will wait a bit for the anking to be effective.
I am still stucked with the alt tags of the images.
FOR JIMBEETLE. Hllo and thanks for your eye on my post.
well Flash is still complicated to be indexed by SE. It will surely improve. So for this I don't bother that much for now.
But the HTML index should be indexed.
Hum...

If the URL doesn't change in the Flash content area, chances are that search engines only see one page. That may be why only two pages are indexed.

hi Beu.
It is ok with the fact that 2 pages are indexed. It works fine.
The problem concerns the 10 images / jpgs that are on the index page. Search engines don't find them.

hi Beu.
It is ok with the fact that 2 pages are indexed. It works fine.
The problem concerns the 10 images / jpgs that are on the index page. Search engines don't find them.

If you would like, post the URL without a hyperlink so we can have a look see!:)

Universal is not that pervasive... you could work with Google Image Search... try this link:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Good point Aussie, I was assuming he had checked Google Images.

Try searching for your images at:
http://images.google.com/

You might also try creating an xml sitemap and submitting it to Google Webmaster Central. Then you can opt into Google's image features via Google Webmaster Central.

Also, you might try adding "PICS" meta data to your site. FOSI has a free label generator at:
http://www.icra.org/label/generator/

For more on PICS see:
http://www.w3.org/PICS/

thanks so much for all this !!!!
But I have 2 questions :
for AUSSIEWEBMASTER : nice "game" but what is the point for me ?
for BEU : I checked already in Google image and there ...nothing.
Do the labels links you kindly sent me are that useful for my problem ?? I actually do not want any kind of label to appear on my site.My public can be anybody but is mostly potential clients for our photography.
BTW, He is a She ;)
Read you around ,

Google Images is separate from the regualr search results... people looking for digital art for site development etc. use Google Images to search for them.

If you are looking to sell your pictures you should register them with the online agencies - they take a commission. And also create individual pages that describe the subject matter and make sure your separate title tags and content for that page is geared to describing the image and that it is a pic - thus you should get some traction in regular search - make sure your naming convention for your navigation is good and try and get people to review your stuff and link to it.

That makes a start

thanks so much for all this !!!!
But I have 2 questions :
for AUSSIEWEBMASTER : nice "game" but what is the point for me ?
for BEU : I checked already in Google image and there ...nothing.
Do the labels links you kindly sent me are that useful for my problem ??

Only one is a label but none of what I suggested would be visible to users. I do think that my suggestions would be of use for your problem. The PICS label would help make the fact that you have images more obvious to search engines and opting into enhanced image search can help improve indexing and search quality of your images.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=48367

While search engines talk all they want about being able to index this format and that format, they still mostly rely on surrounding text for indexing images. For images, TITLE or ALT elements appear to work halfway well. Flash pages? Really have no idea on how to optimize them, maybe somebody else will show up with some techniques.

In flash pages..the search engine didn't understand a flash script that's why spiders didn't crawl a pages like this.

In flash pages..the search engine didn't understand a flash script that's why spiders didn't crawl a pages like this.
Yeah, seach engines have issues with javascript. For Flash sIFR is the best way to go. Either way, search engines can still have problems with Flash.

Crawlers experience problems indexing Flash pages and extracting content especially if the entire site is located at one URL. When it comes to Google Universal search, single images and/or video are difficult to extract from Flash. Also important to note PageRank is assigned on a "page" (URL) by "page" basis. If you have a Flash site and the URL is the same for each "page" that is a problem. If you have a Flash and non-Flash version that can work against you in terms of "growing" PageRank. It's better to go with a non-Flash or partial Flash site from an SEO perspective.
:)

sorry for late reply . I was out..
well i know for flash extraction in SE. The pics that I speak about ( as mentionned in my thread 6)are indeed in html page .
I did not mention that my images are located in a table. Should it be the problem ? I just checked my site again with websiteoptimization.com and none of the images are found !!!
I don't know what to do anymore.

sorry for late reply . I was out..
well i know for flash extraction in SE. The pics that I speak about ( as mentionned in my thread 6)are indeed in html page .
I did not mention that my images are located in a table. Should it be the problem ? I just checked my site again with <SNIP> and none of the images are found !!!
I don't know what to do anymore.

Don't check your site with a site, check it with a search engine!

Go to:
http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&q=site%3Asearchenginewatch.com
and replace "searchenginewatch.com" with your domain name in the search box.

I did not mention that my images are located in a table.
Is there any text near each image? Are you using Title or Alt attributes? You need something to tell the SEs what the image is about.

hi Beu , and thanks for you very very good tip , because Google does not find the site with the image search!!!!!!! must be a really big problem.
BTW, by right clicking on my properties images I get many percentage like :http://www.mysite.com/Picture%20travel%20photography%20by%20Me%. Meanwhile if I click on pics from other website I get ( here for example ) http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/images/misc/logo.gif.
Why do I get this property ? It looks like the URL is false or not found.

Hello Jimbeetle ! well since then the image are not in a table anymore (BTW but the result is still the same- see reply to Beu).
I use a Alt attribute for each image.
Sorry to be still posting on this problem , but my ignorance seems to be beyond any expectation.
And thanks again for your patience with me.
Cheers to you and Beu.

hi Jimbeetle and thanks to be there again too.
I use Alt attribute on each pic. Since my last post I don't use any table anymore, but nothing changed.

The reason you have those percentages is because you are leaving spaces between words in your pictures.
You should use hyphens or underscores as the spiders see them as spaces... the servers always try and fill real spaces and put in the %20 which can stop some spiders.

The reason you have those percentages is because you are leaving spaces between words in your pictures.
You should use hyphens or underscores as the spiders see them as spaces... the servers always try and fill real spaces and put in the %20 which can stop some spiders.

Yep, "%20"s in the URL could be 100% of your problem!:)

I have found the answers to the questions presented here extremely helpful and highly informative. Thank you.

Hi AussieWebmaster and Beu. Thanks. May'be I 'm coming close to the point.. So If I get it well, I have to make the modif in the name of the jpg it self like for ex : travelphotography1byme.jpg instead of Travel photography 1 by me.jpg?
Does it have always to be like that ?
Shall I also make changes in the Alt attribute ?

Hello UKpoet I am happy my problem can help some others , Aussie and Beu have been really great.

CORRECTION MISTAKE !!!!!Hi AussieWebmaster and Beu. Thanks. May'be I 'm coming close to the point.. So If I get it well, I have to make the modif in the name of the jpg it self like for ex : travel-photography-1-by-me.jpg instead of Travel photography 1 by me.jpg?
Does it have always to be like that ?
Shall I also make changes in the Alt attribute ?

Hi AussieWebmaster and Beu. Thanks. May'be I 'm coming close to the point.. So If I get it well, I have to make the modif in the name of the jpg it self like for ex : travelphotography1byme.jpg instead of Travel photography 1 by me.jpg?
Does it have always to be like that ?
Shall I also make changes in the Alt attribute ?

Name of the jpg should not have spaces... for that matter any file name - that means html page, photo, and even subdirectory should not have spaces - use dashes worse case or just spell them together.

The alt tags on the other hand can have spaces

ok txxxx AussieWebmaster, I get it ! i really ignored this ( hum and so many other things ;-))

ok txxxx AussieWebmaster, I get it ! i really ignored this ( hum and so many other things ;-))

There are a lot of things... you will learn them with time

for my images, i used to have alt tag.

for my images, i used to have alt tag.

and what happened?

I am coming back again for the same problem. I changed all I could and waited a bit for the SE to find me again. But nothing changed. BTW even by searching images directly with my URL ...SE don't find anything. So here is a mini list of what I did till now :

put ALT on all images
put a TITLE TAG on all images
put a - between all my jpgs names
Gave an ID to the jpgs in D8

You will find here an example of my HTML :
<body leftmargin="0" topmargin="5" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" onload="preloadImages();">
<!-- ImageReady Slices (index.psd) -->
</style></head>
<table width="901" height="825" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#000000" id="Table_01">
<tr>
<td height="44" colspan="38" bgcolor="#000000">&nbsp;</td>
<td>
<img src="images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="8" alt="" /></td>
</tr>
</table>
<!-- End ImageReady Slices -->
</body>
</html>

<td colspan="18" bgcolor="#000000">&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="2" rowspan="2">
<img src="images/Maldives-Baros-jetty.jpg" alt="Maldives hotel photography 1 " name="Maldives" id="Maldives"title="Maldives hotel photography 1.jpg "width="112" height="76"/></td>

<td>
<img src="images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="37" alt="" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="11" rowspan="4" bgcolor="#000000">&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="4" rowspan="3" bgcolor="#000000"><img src="images/2-waiters.jpg" alt="lifestyle photography 2 " name="Lifestyle" id="Lifestyle" title="lifestyle photography 2.jpg "width="110" height="76"/></td>
<td colspan="3" rowspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="4" rowspan="11" bgcolor="#000000">&nbsp;</td>
<td colspan="4" rowspan="3">
<img src="images/island.jpg" alt="aerial photography "name="island"id="island aerial"title="island photography.jpg "width="112" height="76" /></td>
<td colspan="10" rowspan="5">&nbsp;</td>
<td height="47">
<img src="images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="39" alt="" /></td>
</tr>

NB : all code was quite all automatically given by Photoshop/Image ready and D8...
Thanks to all for your eye again on my problem :o

Hello...glad that I've found this great forum !!!!! :-p
I am a very very beginner with html ( i work with dw8)
I have a problem ....
I read that putting alt text ( in my case to pictures) helps search engines.
So I have a HTML page with 10 images and a bit of text, the rest is a flash site.
I did put the alt text everywhere I could, but still after 2 months on the web, I cant find my images or anything else with any of the search engines.
I keyworded, but I am sure that i do sthing wrong. Could sbdy guide me ?
Thanks

when you change something on the web site, naturally search engines will update their rankings... it doesn't mean you've done something wrong it's just that you made some changes... when you find it hard to rank in search engines after you've done link building then you have to do something with your keywords density and prominence...

this has been done already. My ranking is great ! no, the thing is about the pics themselves. Something must be wrong with the nested tags and I don't know what as I am not very aware yet about all HTML coding. Thanks anyway for passing by !

Why do you need a title, a name and an alt per image?
Also why an ID if you are not styling them via CSS?

Is it just for keywords?

the Alt tag / attribute is a hidden factor meaning the only visitors who will see it are screen readers - special browsers that read the code out for people who cant see - and people when the image fails to load. As a result these tags are devauled. By increasing your keyowrd density in these places does little for your overall SEO.

Keyword density does little anyway. Well written user freindly keyword text on the other hand does.

Bare in mind by having both the alt and title tag to a img, a screen reader will read out that to one of your visitors as

aerial photography island photography dot jpg

Yeah they are going to get a good user experice at your site.

That is a lot of added bloat as well which may actually dilute any keyword prominance with in the actual page any way.

The alt tag should be like this -
the picture is of an areial photo of an island.

alt="an aerial photograph of a caribian island with yellow sandy beaches surronded by a light blue sea, to the bottom is a blood pool of the latest shark attack victim"

That way you get keywords in, bold above, dont annoy the intended audiance and give them a nice user experience as they will more than likley come back to you as they have got a rare experiance at that.

-rare experiance - some one built them a usable site that doesn't sound like toss when it is being read to them.

Build your site for your visitors with the SE's in mind.
You could rank number 1 for all your keywords but that does very little if your site is inaccessable and unuseable as no one will stay long enough - 54% of site visitors on average leave after 2 clicks. If they clicked once they knew they where in the right place you just failed to keep them intressted.

If your site is unusable by people with disabilities you are breaking the law in the US and the UK, some thing else most people tend to forget about or are not aware of.

Jaza

Hey Itsme,
First: I just read a really good blog post by Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/page/2/) that talked about Google taking a little while to get to all of the images out there on the web today. It could just be a matter of time before the SE's pick them up.

Second: be very descriptive in the way you name your images. Don't use abbreviations, name the image exactly what it is and use hyphens to separate your words. Hyphens are looked at as spaces by the spiders and it makes it easier to read. This practice of naming your images this way can also translate over to how you name other files as well. Try to use your researched keywords when naming images, html files, style sheets and folders just to gain that extra edge.

Your file names should include your keywords. Also be just as descriptive in your alt text. Again keywords here are good but only if it makes sense. You can get flagged for keyword stuffing alt text. Google has been changing a lot over the last year and their new blended search results include images in the regular search as well as Google images. They try to come up with the best match to your query but can only do it through well tagged images.

Third: You may want to consider Flash elements instead of a Flash site when it is time to redesign. The SE's can't yet read images and that is what they see Flash as. You should add what we call spider food, which is keyword rich content, title tags, description tags, alt text, h1 tags and link text.

Jazazay ( and all the people who helped me ;-))) I don't know what happened but all my images are NOW poping up on images researches ( Google and Yahoo). It happened 2 days ago, after having been orrecting my code with Tidy and uploading a sitemap to Google.Nothing else. Coincidence or just big delay from the "lunatic" spiders to find them ?? Can not explain. I did not even had the time to change all the things you advised me, it was a long process for me to get everything right. Jazazay, Thank you again and again xxx for all your great and precious posts that I kept apart for my future site improvement. I will try to go through this JS big story. BTW I totally agree that it is always better to do everything by myself, but I have so many things to learn that the fastest and most secure way was Tidy.
Thanks to everybody and have all success in your projects
CHEERS !

It was probably just a load of changes in quick succession. Leave it a week and check back. As long as they are showing on your site and you are not spamming have just the alt tag/attribute and not the alt title and id all the same, blocked your site via robots.txt, meta noindex, or placed rel=nofollow on all the links to those pages, it should clear up.

Jaza