Optimizing images for SEO
Once again I wouldn’t recommend going back to already created content and optimizing the images. It doesn’t create enough benefit to do that. However, if you’re creating fresh content then you should be following best practice.
Images have a couple of elements to them that should be properly optimized. The first is the image file name. Make this descriptive and unique. I’ve found getting into the habit of naming images properly has come in pretty handy when looking through my laptop or on a CMS to dig out an image to use for an article.
Images also have a written description, through the image title and alt tag. These are two HTML elements which provide written information about the image. I tend to just fill out the alt tag for an image and leave the title blank. Technically the title is there to give the image name and the alt tag is meant to describe the image. The alt tag is also important from an accessibility viewpoint. Screen readers will read the alt tag to describe the image to the user.
Make sure the image alt tag uses keywords related to the information on-page. Google also uses the content surrounding an image to try and determine its purpose. You want to make sure that this all ties together and focuses on the same topic.
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Flash and SEO
Google does not like flash. In fact not many people do. The main reason for this is the security risk that it poses. It’s easy for malicious types to use it to infect your device when it’s loaded by your browser. Many people (including myself) have flash turned off by default in their browser. HTML5 has now come along and replaced much of the functionality flash was used for. Even display ads are now phasing out flash in favour of HTML5. Signalling what may be the death knell Google Ads will not allow you to upload flash based ads from this July and will stop displaying flash ads across the network from January next year.
Suffice it to say Google is not a fan of flash. Aside from the accessibility and vulnerability problems flash pages have no URLs. So it’s hard for Google to access and understand the content. Text within flash can be indexed, but with the rise of mobile devices which do not support flash Google actively steers mobile searchers away from flash heavy sites:
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It's not just who links to you that's important, but where you link to. This can affect both relevance and trust. If you're linking out to on-topic sites from your content that's a good indication that the content is relevant to the terms in question.
Linking out to low quality sites from bad neighbourhoods, sends a negative signal to Google. Even no-follow links to poor quality sites are likely to damage rankings.
