The NYTimes Story on JC Penny’s Dirty Search Secrets

NY times has a great article on how JC penny ranked for a wide range of words in the top position & the little secrets of search. Google has been policing the Search engine optimization world since it went live. Black hat SEO techniques can be used to gain top rankings. JC penny has ranked for a wide variety of words in Google. Several sites have been linking to JC penny site through a wide variety of keywords. After the issue broke out, rankings of the site has gone down in Google. Also the company has fired its SEO consultant company.

SEO tools for Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis for SEO is one of the important aspects. It helps understand how the competitors are doing with respect to ranking, keywords, website & others. This helps implement some new strategies for your website. Some of it can be done manually in Google by searching for their website. There are also some tools available which helps in this process. Earlier Alexa was one of the important tools. Now a variety of free & paid tools are there for the analysis. Some of the free tools are 1) Alexa 2) Compete.com 3) Google ad Planner 4) Google Insights 5) Google trends for the website 6) Quantcast. These provide a wealth of information for the SEO purposes. This would help outrank your competitors website.

SEO Image Optimization

Image optimization for SEO plays an important role in ranking of the site & also traffic. Some of the important steps in Image optimization are

1) use the Right sized image as it helps load the site faster
2) Use keyword rich alt text.
3) text surrounding the text should be also keyword rich as it helps search engines rank it easily.
4) Also png files should be used. GIF & JPEG takes more time to load & this may affect the ranking.
5) Also try to get links from external sites to the images. This helps in backlinks.
6) Providing a HTML embed code will help spread the images virally.