Using Images Instead of Text to Control Keywords on Page
-
We have recently updated a key page on our website. It is a template page that is used many times to display search results. The words "price", "revenue", and "cash flow", "not disclosed" are used for each listing on the page -- to minimize their impact on keyword density on the page we used images for these words. Here you can see some examples:
- http://www.businessbroker.net/State/Florida-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
- http://www.businessbroker.net/City/Los Angeles-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
- http://www.businessbroker.net/Industry/Auto_Car_Wash-Businesses_For_Sale.aspx
You will note these words on this page are images and not regular text.
We are certainly not doing this to "dupe" the visitors or Google -- we just want to ensure that each page has keywords pertinent to what the page is about.
Bottom line question -- is this an OK practice? Are we running any risk with Google by doing this? I'm particularly nervous these days with all of the Google changes.
Your thoughts and guidance on this issue would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
- MWM
-
Hi Khem - Thank-you for your response, I appreciate it. - Matt M
-
Hi Cyrus - I appreciate the response - makes good sense. We will be doing a comprehensive review of our title tags and making necessary adjustments so they don't appear "spammy" -- good suggestion! Thanks again, appreciate it. - Matt M
-
Hi MWM,
It's completely natural for websites to have certain words repeating over and over. Consider the typical listing page for Amazon - (Price, reviews, etc) Google encounters this all the time and it's natural to assume these words don't really play into ranking considerations. So I honestly don't see anything to gain by adding images.
That said, I doubt the images hurt you very much... I simply don't believe they are worth the effort.
On another note, you might want to take a look at your title tags. We've seen Google get more aggressive about cracking down on keyword stuffed title tags. Repeating your keywords more than once or twice is a definite red flag. For example, I might take this:
"Florida Business for Sale Ads - Florida Businesses for Sale & Business Brokers - Sell a Business on Business Broker"
and turn it into
"Florida Business for Sale Ads - Buy & Sell at BusinessBroker.net"
...needs a little refining, but you get the idea. Best of luck!
-
Specifically in your case, these things appear be genuine so you may use either image or text. Google will not harm your website
But make sure to use meaningful and informative description for all your listing instead of focusing on keywords but that doesn't mean that you can't use keywords if required
-
I believe the following article can answer all your queries, which you even have not asked.
From my side, as long as the words/keywords are used genuinely, you really need not to worry about that. There is no such think called Keyword Density, Reciprocal links as long as they are natural and genuine.
Read more: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Use of "/" and using fractions in titles
We are a company that sells pipe and fittings. An example of a part that someone will search for is : 3/4" PVC Socket I am not sure how best to represent the fraction in the title of the page that has such a product. I am concerned that if I use the forward slash it will be misinterpreted by search engines (although it will be interpreted properly by users). A lot of folk search for the product by the fraction size and so it would be good to be able to represent it in the title, but I don't want to get "punished" by confusing search engines. I could replace the forward slash with a hyphen or pipe symbol, but then may look a bit weird to our users... Any recommendations? Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobBawden11 -
Moz Pro > Links > Top Pages: many are images, useful?
My site is 10 years old, and has always ranked well for the variety of garden tools it sells. Looking at our Moz Pro > Links > Top Pages report I see that many of the "pages" are actually image URLs. And many of those are images we do not even use anymore (though they are still hosted). Question: As a way of gaining some link juice to deeper pages, what about 301 redirecting some of those old images over to appropriate pages? (example: redirecting old-weeding-hoe.jpg to the page garden-hoes.html) Would it be worthwhile? Would it be safe? Thanks for any and all input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
May integrating my main category page in the index page improve my ranking of main category keyword?
90% of our sales are made with products in one of our product categories.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
A search for main category keyword returns our root domain index page in google, not the category page.
I was wondering whether integrating the complete main category directly in the index page of the root domain and this way including much more relevant content for this main category keyword may have a positive impact on our google ranking for the main category keyword. Any thoughts?1 -
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Our client's web property recently switched over to secure pages (https) however there non secure pages (http) are still being indexed in Google. Should we request in GWMT to have the non secure pages deindexed?
Our client recently switched over to https via new SSL. They have also implemented rel canonicals for most of their internal webpages (that point to the https). However many of their non secure webpages are still being indexed by Google. We have access to their GWMT for both the secure and non secure pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB
Should we just let Google figure out what to do with the non secure pages? We would like to setup 301 redirects from the old non secure pages to the new secure pages, but were not sure if this is going to happen. We thought about requesting in GWMT for Google to remove the non secure pages. However we felt this was pretty drastic. Any recommendations would be much appreciated.0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0