Monday, June 14, 2010

Animated GIF Images for SEO

Animated GIF images are a great way to attract attention to certain parts of your site, create simple but effective banner ads, or simply have fun. Memorializing your favorite scenes from movies in GIF format is a riot.

The internal linking structure as well as directory structure of the website / web pages throughout the whole website is very important. There are many contents/products that anyone cannot insert all the data on only the homepage. There has to be other pages where we have to insert appropriate data at appropriate places. Deep pages have more keywords rich contents rather than only home page & those pages are needed to be optimized for better rankings.

There are many ways in which one can define Internal Linking Structure as per their website. The following are the different ways in which once can define internal linking structure:

  1. Simple Anchor Text Links / Simple Hyper Text Links
  2. Image Navigation Icons or Buttons
  3. JavaScript Dropdown/Pull down Menu or DHTML Dropdown / Pulldown Menu
  4. Animated Gifs and Flash Navigation
  5. Image Map Navigation
  6. Frameset / Framed Navigation

In this post we will cover only the second point that is Image Navigation Icons or Buttons

4.1 Animated Gifs

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format which is a bitmap image format. GIF was introduced by CompuServe in 1980’s. Now-a-days, it is widely used on WWW (World Wide Web) because of its huge support & portability. GIF is also used as animation by turning through a series of static images or for motion pictures.

GIF images are created by designers with the series of frames. There are many types of softwares available on the internet to create GIF images. Designers can also control its time for each frame & measure the fraction of seconds for better usability. GIF format supports upto 8 bits per pixel allowing a single image to reference a palette of up to 256 distinct colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. GIF animation allows a separate palette of 256 colours for each frame. GIF images or animated GIF limits its colour usage incompatible for reproducing photographs & other images with continuous colours. GIF is more suitable for simple images for graphics or company’s Logo.

Sometimes GIF images are too heavy which gets time to load pages. Therefore, we need to optimize those images so that it can get load in particular time frame. There are many search engines which crawl images including Google.

GIF images are used as light weighted animation format all over WWW instead of other heavy graphic format like JPG, PSD, and etc. all the other file format supports more than 8 bit colour palette. GIF images are highly used for user attraction. For example, in the contact us page instead of submit button one can always prefer to use more user friendly graphic image of Submit so that it can attract user to click on it. GIF images are also used for better navigation purpose so that user can easily navigate your website.

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