@growmap: Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Your points about the basic nature of most clients ring as true. Thanks for the endorsement. You and I have been engaged in conversation here now for years, so your opinion of our work is qualified. We appreciate your friendship and street-smarts.

Since the latest version of FF came out, that item seems to be gone from the contextual menu. In its place is “View Image Info.” Clicking that opens the Page Info pop-up in its “Media” tab. On that tab, you can see the location, type, size, and dimensions of the image, along with something called its “Associated Text”. You’d think that would be the alt attribute, but it isn’t always. I’ve tried it out on a number of images and pages, and it looks like it shows the alt attribute if there is one, but the title attribute if there’s no alt, and it does nothing to indicate which of the two it’s showing you, so you have to open up the source code to check for yourself.

That brings me back to the Web Developer Toolbar. From the Images menu, you can select “Display Alt Attributes.” That’s certainly easier for site owners than working their way through a page’s source code, but it does mean you’d have to tell them to install another extension.

If we’re talking about basic image optimization beyond just alt attributes, is that they should make sure the HTML doesn’t force a larger image into a smaller space, which unnecessarily slows down page load time. That’s something you can get from the “View Image Info” menu item I mentioned before. I just checked an image on the home page of a client’s site, and despite the developer telling me he’s taken care of this, I can see that the dimensions are “570px × 310px (scaled to 251px × 137px)”. Not good. If a properly-sized image was in there, there’d be no “scaled to…” section.

I have to politely disagree with relying too much on linkscape. It’s definitely a useful measure of link popularity and I do use it often. However, I do believe it’s not updated as frequently these days? I could be wrong about this though.

I do a lot of local SEO (not in the US), and for local purposes, having a video strategy may or may not be relevant if you are targeting searchers looking for local results. For example, “Singapore dentist” probably won’t return any video results. I would say that a search marketer doing local search optimization should be optimizing for Google local business results instead.

Just my 2 cents.

I think another perspective on this is where companies hire SEO consultants and then do not continue to engage those consultants for content optimization Quality Assurance. How many companies have overwritten a SEO consultant’s on-page SEO after 9 months resulting in many of the “irrelevant SEO” signals mentioned above. At least in cases where the advice is sound, we’d like to think the implementation sticks. But that’s not always the case. Just a thought.

Good job on a useful post.