John Jantsch

This post might look a bit geeky, but the subject matter is important for usability of websites and blogs, and for its search implications. In other words, the information here can help your search engine ranking. And the core information comes from the horse’s mouth – via a key Google operative.

I have a working knowledge of Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML, the publishing language of the World Wide Web. Enough to do basic modifications and updates on websites and blogs. I know that using ALT attributes for image tags is a Good Thing, not least for reasons of accessibility – a blind person or one with a visual disability is going to be frustrated in reading a page, say via Braille, if there is no ALT attribute for an image. This is especially important if the image is crucial for understanding the website page or blog post.

The ALT attribute is also useful for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In addition, the ALT attribute also serves when, for whatever reason, the browser cannot display the image, or images have been turned off. The text – “ALT”=”alternative” – is then displayed on the viewer’s screen.

Watching a short video just now (thanks to John Jantsch for the link), where Matt Cutts from Google explains the why and how of using ALT attributes, was a good prompt for me on all this. Not least because it reminded me that if I want Google (or any other search engine) to include my images in its search activities, I need to make it easier for the search engine to discover just what the image is about. And it seems that having a title for the image, while good, does not serve the same function or have the same value as the ALT attribute.

In the days when I hand-coded most of the image inserts in web pages, I used to be very assiduous in adding ALT attribute. More recently, using a variety of offline and online blog editing tools, which do not universally provide a prompt to insert an ALT attribute, I’ve been slack. For example, I’m composing this post on Microsoft’s excellent (and free) Windows Live Writer and if I want insert an image I click on an icon in the tool bar, then get a screen where I can either upload the image or enter a web address (URL) for one. But if I want an ALT attribute I have to switch to the HTML view and insert the code manually.

LiveWriter editing screen image insert

Although I regard LiveWriter as a superior editing too, on the ALT attribute score the editing tool in WordPress is more helpful.

When I want to insert an image, using the WordPress WYSIWYG tool, I click on the image icon in the toolbar and get a box for inserting the necessary details. Included is a field for “Image description” – which is in fact, the space for me to insert the ALT attribute:

WordPress editing tool insert image box

As in the next image:

WordPress editing tool insert image box, with text

Whichever editing tool I use, once I have inserted the image I will see it displayed in the draft, for example:

Floral display with Olympics logo, Temple of Heaven, Beijing

What the search engine and the person who is not visually able will be able to read is the wording in the ALT attribute, in this case “Floral display Olympics logo, Temple of Heaven, Beijing”. (Note that I could also put some “Title” coding in the HTML or a title under the image, but I don’t want to complicate the issue more than necessary.)

So now, with the three images above, because I’m composing in LiveWriter, I need to insert the ALT code manually. That will be true whether I do that here in LiveWriter or wait till I have sent the draft to my WordPress site. The alternative is to not insert the images here but wait till the text is in WordPress and then insert the images using the WordPress tool.

I prefer to do as much of the editing as I can in LiveWriter, including the insertion of images. For the person who wants to use LiveWriter or another offline editing tool but does not want to be fussed with the code, it is a sensible option to not insert the image until the text is ported to WordPress. That way you still have the sense of security that your text has been saved on your computer hard drive (provided you make sure to use the Save Local Draft option in LiveWriter) and is not at the mercy of a mid-drafting outage, always a risk in composing online (especially if, as happens from time to time where I live, a storm or other incident takes out your power and Internet connection).

I trust this post is helpful to readers wanting to make sure their images count in the search engines’ ranking. I welcome any technical corrections needed and practical suggestions for doing all this better.

I do hope a future update of LiveWriter will have something like the WordPress editing tool’s capacity for entering image-related details in a the “Normal” mode, so that it is not necessary to fiddle with the code (it’s so easy for me to mess up the code doing that and then have to laboriously sort it all out). I met some of the LiveWriter development team at BlogWorld Expo and was very impressed by their enthusiasm and keenness to have the product deliver as well as possible and will of course make sure they see this post .

About six months ago I installed on my Thinking Home Business and then on this blog the lijit search and statistics tool.

I acknowledge I’m a fan of lijit and have been from the outset. The fandom is due in no small measure to the attention the people at lijit obviously pay to those who use their product. For example, within – as I recall – about 24 hours of installing lijit, I noticed on my MyBlogLog widget some new visitors, who turned out to be lijit executives. Impressive!

Then I found the lijit people amazingly responsive to questions and feedback. I suppose I’m so used to those pro-forma emails you get from companies who have asked for feedback (don’t they all?) saying someone will be in touch soon and then you never hear, or you get a waffly, weasel-word copout response, at best.

Not so lijit. They address what you say or ask and respond as human beings, telling you what they are able to do and what might have to go on a wishlist.

Meeting the lijit people at BlogWorld Expo confirmed the impression of a company actually wanting to engage with bloggers and have real conversations.

And yes, I do have a very cool lijit t-shirt from BlogWorld Expo, but I would be a fan anyway.

But it’s probably fair to say that, before I installed lijit, I hadn’t really thought a lot about the value or otherwise of installing a search tool, either in addition to or instead of the default search tool that seems to come with all or most blogging platforms.

I knew I could, for example, install a Google search engine on a blog, with the options of searching either the site or the Web generally. I resisted that, I suppose because I thought it was just a free kick for Google and anyway there was already a search tool installed.

I realise now that that thinking was rather narrow. Lorelle Van Fossen has a neat post on why and how, on a WordPress site, you would think about replacing the default tool with a third party search tool (such as, but not necessarily, Google) and how you would do that.

And John Jantsch wrote the other day about why bloggers should think about installing a search engine and specifically about installing the new Google Custom Search on his blog. He is obviously pleased with what it does and also with the fact that it provides statistics of what people are looking for on your site.

That sounded good. But I knew that lijit also provides a quality search functionality (I have tested it) and provides extensive, detailed statistics. And, like the non-professional version of Google Custom Search, lijit is free.

So I thought it was time to have a good look at what lijit was actually providing and see if I could perhaps make even better use of it than I’ve done so far and then to blog about it.

First I emailed lijit and asked for a comment on Google Custom Search as praised in John Jantsch’s post. I was told that lijit’s CEO Todd Vernon had left a comment on that post (I’ve been checking since and haven’t seen it but it was pointed out to me that comments on that blog are moderated). I’ll be interested to read those comments in due course, assuming they appear, but in the meantime I have had a good email conversation with lijit and have also listened – twice – to a very interesting session on BlogTalk Radio Mediasphere, where my good friends and colleagues Jim Turner and Tris Hussey had a very lively interview/discussion the other day with Todd Vernon himself.

So I feel I’ve now got a reasonable grasp of what lijit offers and why – as the title of this post says – lijit loves bloggers.

The short explanation of what lijit does, from the company website, is:

Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine. One that searches your blog, bookmarks, photos, blogroll, and more. By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog, readers can search all of YOU. In turn, Lijit gives you detailed statistics about those searches, so you can better understand and serve your reader community.

From my notes of the BlogTalk Radio interview with Todd Vernon (TV), here is my summary of what makes lijit special in terms of being a blog search and statistics tool.

lijit differs from other players in the search space, such as Technorati, in that lijit is not a “destination website”.

From the beginning, lijit’s goal was to leverage trust online, drawing on how we handle relationships offline.

What people do in real life is totally different from what they do online – in the real world “you tend to go ask people you know”: you use your relationships with people as metadata.

There is really no equivalent to that in the online space. You reach for Google and then you start sifting through mountains of data.

But in the online world there is a “sort of a parallel” to the real world approach, and that is essentially the blogosphere.

“The reason you read blogs is you identify with the position. You may not agree with the position, but as you read them you understand that metadata the same way you understand people when you talk to them in real life.” (TV)

The service is based simply on a widget you plug into your website. lijit uses the term “publishers”, which includes bloggers but extends beyond them.

Subscribers/readers find out not only what the publisher has written, but also what the publisher might have found on del.icio.us, photos the publisher has posted on flickr, and then the other influencers in the publisher’s life, for example via a blogger’s blogroll and MyBlogLog information.

Subscribers can mine data through you and through your network, using the metadata they’ve learned about you.

This helps the subscriber. It is also helpful for the publisher, because lijit provides the publisher with statistics on all this activity.

So what’s the big difference from competitors?

Todd Vernon says it’s that lijit wants to provide “really cool stuff for publishers”. He sees this as a major diffentiator.

They are trying to find people with interesting content who don’t necessarily hit the radar screen on other services.

Their focus is not on page rank – “we’re essentially like ‘people rank’” – tracking a page rank type behavior in the linking but “more of a respect metric”, “an information metric”.

Looking at “the entire social structure” of the participating publishers.

And what lijit found interesting about publishers, especially in the blogging space, is that a blog tends to be a “Rosetta stone” of the things the publisher is involved in. “It shows their tweets, it shows their connections to the blog world, to other people. It shows where their photos are.”

What lijit has developed is how to rapidly consume that information, almost instantaneously, and build the social network of its publishers.

The signup is easy and rapid. And how is this for a claim, for any business? “We have zero churn” (TV).

There are a few areas where I would like to see changes. Especially the fact that the system does not seem to have been structured so far to accommodate easily those of us (and we are many) who have more than one blog. At present, to get lijit working adequately on separate blogs I’ve had to create separate lijit accounts/identities. That to me looks like a glitch that needs to be overcome. I’ve raised it with them. They have taken notice. To me that’s a good sign.

But crucially for bloggers, as Todd Vernon has said, the business is targeted at bloggers and other publishers. “The primary customers are publishers” (TV).

Which is why lijit loves bloggers.

And why it is my expectation that more bloggers will come to love lijit.