The beauty of images is that it is relatively easier to optimize for image search engines than it is to get a page into the first page of a Google Web search.  Also, Google has been incorporating Google Image Search results into more and more Web search queries.  This would make your images show up higher than some organic search results.  In February 2012, Google announced that more queries on Google’s Web search would now include images.  This is to show relevant images to a larger number of searches than before.

More than that, Google also announced that due to the Panda update, they are now capable of indexing new images faster than usual.  So new images show up in the index faster.

Images have always proved to be a good source of traffic to your content.  This is the reason why it is a good practice to include relevant images with your blog posts and Web pages.

So how do you make your images show up on and rank high on Google Image search?  Here are some of the best practices:

1. Use informative filenames.

Instead of using something generic such as DSC-000.jpg, change the filename to something descriptive such as Bright-Sunshine.jpg.  Google can get a lot of information about the photo just from the filename alone.  Google can also use file names as the snippet for the image file.

2. Use ALT text.

When you include an image to your blog posts or Web pages, be sure to fill in the alt attribute.  Google uses the alt attribute to know what the image is all about.  The alt attribute can also help people browsing your page know what the image is all about even when they do not load the images.

As usual, the more descriptive the alt text is, the better but do not stuff it with keywords.

For instance, a good alt attribute would be:

alt=”white siamese cat”

Keyword stuffed alt attributes:

alt=”white siamese cat kitten siamese kitten kitty pet food”>

3. Use anchor text

If you are linking to a page that displays your photos, it would be good to use a descriptive anchor text to link to that page.

4. Proximity counts.

If you are going to target keywords, remember that photos may be tied to particular keywords if they are near it.  For example, your keyword is Great Wall of China.  You images may rank well for Great Wall of China is you have that keyword written near it in the caption, or description of the photo.

5. Image relevance.

The image’s relevance to the page is also taken into account.  For example, do not use an image of a DSLR camera on a page that talks about lung cancer.

6. Protect your images.

Always protect your images.  Google frowns upon duplicate content and this includes images.  If your images are not original, you would have some difficulty getting into Image Search results.

A good practice is to allow people to use your photos, but be sure that they attribute it to you or provide an HTML code that they could use to display your images.  This will help you get more mileage from your images.

7. Think of human users too.

As with everything else, Google rewards those who take user experience into consideration.  Your images should be:

a. Of good quality.  Blurry images and photos that are not clear would turn off users and webmaster would not be reusing your photos for their pages.  Sharp images also look better in thumbnail versions that people see in search results.

b. Use the prime space for your images.  The prime space is that space of your page that can be seen by users without scrolling down.

c. Create a landing page for each image.  You can use this standalone landing page to put in the different information about the photo such as titles, captions, descriptions and other descriptive and identifying information.

d. Save the images in one directory.  No matter where you use the images, be it in your home page, your blog posts or other pages in your website, it is best to save all images in just one directory.  You could separate thumbnails from full sized images in their own directories too.

e. Be sure to put in the height and width of all images.  This can speed up the loading time for the page.

This Week in Internet Marketing 2012 05 15

Conducting a 5 Minute Brand Reputation Audit 

A company’s brand reputation can’t be measured in currency; however, creating a trustworthy and notable brand presence online can be measured. To ensure online conversion of your brand’s reputation is paired with your company goals, an audit is essential. There are many simple online tools to assist brand management; nonetheless, to ensure success, consistent maintenance is a must. This article outlines the steps to conducting a brand audit for the first time.

How Social and Mobile is the New iGeneration

With mobile internet and email use becoming more popular than computer activity adapting to this change is inevitable for a brand’s success. In order to gain the attention of the digital natives and “iGeneration” online users, a brands digital platforms must be accessible through mobile devices. This study outlines what digital media, brands and devices are important to college students.

10 Great Adwords Options For Boosting Conversions

TechWyse PPC managers are experts when it comes to understanding the ins and outs of paid search. Nevertheless, for beginners AdWords might not come easy. Understanding AdWords will help boost conversions and also provide a better ROI. Search Engine Land columnist, Matties Otter, highlights the necessary features that can help users get the most out of AdWords.

How to Choose an SEO Consultant

SEO is a two-way street to success. In order for a website to be optimized correctly a strong relationship and understanding must be created between the consultant and the client. The client shouldn’t be asking all the questions; an SEO consultant should be the one asking questions to get to know your company better. Picking the right SEO consultant can help your website rise to the top.

More Internet Marketing Headlines

Four Steps To Create The Foundation For Social SEO

Bing Ties Facebook Into Search, Is It Too Much?

Google Places Launches New Bulk Listing Management Tool

Insights From the Recent Penguin & Panda Updates

The Noob Guide to Link Building

Google held its position as did the other major search engines Yahoo! and Bing. The Chinese search engine Baidu saw a gain of ~1%. Stats provided by Net Market Share.

Google Maintains Dominance for Yet Another Month

Google has made a recovery from its February 2012 slump and remains comfortably ahead of the pack at ~79% desktop search engine market share.

Yahoo! Remains #2 Among English Search Engines

Yahoo! is up over 1% since its yearly low of 5.55% in December 2011, but still remains a distant second behind Google.

Bing Fails to Crack the 5% Mark Yet Again

Bing seems to hover around the 4% mark each month. They’re up 0.69% since last year but continue to trail Yahoo! and of course, Google.

Baidu Dominates China; Garners 7.71% Worldwide Market Share

Chinese search engine Baidu continues to carve a chunk out of worldwide search engine market share as the country’s online population expands.

There are three main steps to ensure your inbound marketing strategy is successful.  Before you start looking for a company to deal with these issues for, you should find out what inbound marketing actually is and how it can help you and your business.  So, before we actually look at these steps, let’s look at what inbounding marketing is and how it will help you.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is known as pull marketing, as opposed to push marketing.  Pull marketing means that you find prospective clients online by making sure the content of your website is optimised with using the right keywords in the right places.  Understanding keywords is very important and can be hard to get to grips with.  Basically, you need to go into the mind of your prospective customer and think about the words they would use to find a company like yours.  If you build a website and it isn’t generating daily leads, you will miss out on a huge amount of business.  After all, unless people are coming to your website, you won’t generate any money.

The Three Steps

The first step of inbound marketing is to make sure that traffic to your website is increased.  This is achieved by looking at the content you are offering and thinking of ways to make this better.  This is known as optimising.  Besides optimising what is already there, inbound marketing also looks at creating new content to attract potential clients.

Step two is about being able to convert this traffic into leads.  This is done by human interaction and virtual interaction.  A call to action will be accomplished by making offers that a customer can’t refuse.  Once a lead has been generated, they need to be nurtured, so that they turn into returning customers.

Step three is analysing your strategy.  You need to think long and hard about what is and isn’t working.  Monitor your competition and find out what they are doing that you are not.  One other very important part in include in your strategy is social media.  The opportunities for interaction you get with your customers by using websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are tremendous and should never be forgotten.

How to Find an Inbound Marketing Company

If you are looking for a good inbound marketing company, you need to take the time to compare different ones.  One thing that will tell you whether or not a company is any good is by checking the results they have had with previous clients.  A company should also be able to offer you all the necessary services, conveniently placed into a single package.  It is always advised to request at least three different quotations.  This will allow you to best compare the different packages that are on offer and how they can work for you.  Don’t be tempted to just go for the cheapest offer, what you are looking for is the best value for money.  Nothing in life is free, unfortunately, but going for the cheapest option can mean that you also get the worst service and thereby don’t generate any leads.  Hence, regardless of how little money you have spent, it is still fully wasted.

1.) The first thing you need to do is optimize your keywords. Keywords are everything in a PPC campaign, so you need to make sure that you are choosing keywords that actually match up with your business.

2.) Try to find a target audience. You will only be able to choose the right keywords if you know about your target audience, so do some research on what kind of people would be interested in your products or services.

3.) Learn about all of the different types of keywords you can use. There are special features, such as negative keywords, that will actually help you optimize your PPC campaign even better in the long run.

4.) Remember to optimize your location. If you are a business that only operates in the state of Virginia, then there is no reason to market your services to the rest of the country.

5.) Add special offers into your PPC text. You need to bring as many visitors to your website as possible, so make sure that you are giving them an offer that they will not be able to refuse.

6.) Let your prospective visitors know as much about what you have to offer in that small bit of text. You want to make sure that you are actually converting some of these leads into sales, so don’t hit your visitors with something completely different from what they were expecting when they clicked your link.

7.) Get very specific with your keywords. You will usually be able to find better deals on clicks if you pick out specific key phrases with many words in them, so keep this in mind when you are making your keyword selections.

8.) Think about what time of the day will be best for your ads. PPC campaigns can be optimized for certain hours of the day, so take a look at which hours seem to do the best for you and stick with those hours for the near future.

9.) Differentiate between your homepage and your landing page. Your landing page is going to need to go along with exactly what your visitor is looking for after clicking that certain keyword. You cannot throw them off by only bringing them to your homepage with information that they did not want.

10.) Remember to stay on top of your Quality Score for Adwords. This score affects your overall ranking and bids for certain keywords.

There are many different aspects of a PPC campaign to think about, but you will be able to figure out everything on your own if you take the time to learn about Google Adwords and other similar services.

In order for social media automation to be effective, it needs to be used the right way. The followings tips will help you effectively automate social media.

1.) Choose the Right Automation Tools.

There are numerous tools out there that can help you automate your social media tactics more easily. The problem is that since there are so many available, it can be hard to determine which one is best. Hootsuite, Sprout Social and HubSpot are three platforms that allow you to automate multiple social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. There are also others, such as TweetDeck, that allow you update your Twitter account, but it can also feed the same tweet to your other social media accounts too.

Some tools are available for free while others cost money. Before you know which tool is right for you, you need to do your research and find out the benefits of each one to determine which is the best fit for your company. You should also decide if you want to pay for a platform of if you’d rather use a free one.

2.) Choose the Right Time.

This requires some measurement on your part. You need to find out what days and what time of the day your customers are most likely to read and engage with you via social media. Once you have this information, you need to be sure to schedule your posts during the optimal times. This way, you won’t miss out on reaching your audience.
You also need to determine when you can engage. Automation may be a great way to start the conversation, but you need to physically be able to continue the conversation, too. If a user comments on one of your Facebook posts, you need to respond. If you don’t, you won’t build a relationship with your customers, and being ignored will only irritate them.

3. Choose the Right Content.

While all social networks revolve around engaging with customers and creating conversations, they shouldn’t all be used the same way. Don’t post the same exact message through all of your networks. Your Twitter followers are probably also friends or fans of yours on Facebook, and they don’t want to see the same verbatim message from you appear in all of their news feeds.

Instead, use each social network to their advantage. Twitter only allows for 140 characters, so use it for snippets and click-through links. Facebook doesn’t have a character limit, so feel free to use these posts to be more informative. Just because you have the possibility to automate doesn’t mean the content has to be exactly the same.
Automation is a great way to use social media, but it shouldn’t be the only form of social media engagement you implement. While it can start the conversation, and while it allows you to schedule items in advance so you don’t forget about them, you still need to continue the conversation with your fans and followers, and this requires the talents of a real human. Be sure to physically monitor your social media accounts and engage with your users. This will help your automation be more successful, and it will keep your customers happy.

Optimizing images

You SEO strategy can be hampered if you are unable to embed images properly over the different web pages. There are three major elements for embedding images which improves your optimization part. This includes, the filename, Alt attributes and title attribute. While naming the files, you should use keywords which are relevant to the images. Also, the Alt attributes must use relevant keywords to your images. This therefore helps in indexing these keywords over the popular search engines. Lastly, the title attribute can help you to highlight the importance of any link and it relevant landing page to different search engines.

Web page loading times

The amount of time your web pages take to load decides your website ranking over the search engines. The search engines are meant to give the users the best results and hence consider the website with more loading time as negative thus affecting your site’s ranking. In order to reduce the loading time, you are supposed to carry out a couple of things. These include optimizing all your images found over your website, along with using file hosting service and optimizing your CSS. Lastly, if you see your webpage running any widgets or java script, it is highly recommended to set them up so that they simply load once the main content area has finished the loading process.

The HTML 5 element

The HTML 5 has basically two major SEO advantages. Firstly, you can control the load time and secondly, it gives a number of tags to the designers to use. HTML 5 is a great substitute for Flash as it gives you an opportunity to incorporate interactive media over your website which will avoid dragging it down too much. The designers can use a number of tags which they find from this option. This helps them to organize your website and structure its content. It therefore helps the search engines to comprehend your website in a proper way. The tags include things like header, foots, section, article, div etc. The HTML 5 tags are effective method to render additional signal to search engines to let them know that the specific section of web page or some page is relevant to the set of keywords.

The CSS Stylesheet Element

The CSS Stylesheet helps you to standardize your overall website appearance. You have the option to use either the internal or external CSS, but it is recommended to use the external ones. This will help your HTML codes to go in a concise and precise way.

There are number of methods which can help you to optimize your website designs for better rankings over search engines. With these tips and tricks as discussed above, you can certainly help to improve your website rankings. A consistent effort with these ideas can help you achieve your desired goal for your website.

This Week in Internet Marketing 2012 05 08

What is Negative SEO? And How to Protect Yourself

Negative SEO is the practice of performing spammy off-page activity on your competitors’ sites. It’s a very real threat and though it’s not something you can completely defend against, there are steps you can take to protect yourself. Content is the best way to tell Google what you’re about, a solid site structure helps too, user-friendly design and a clean link profile will also win you points. The bigger your site is, the higher your spam threshold will be. At the same time Google is aware of this practice and does make considerations for those victimized by this black hat tactic.

Changes Coming to AdWords Ad Rotation Settings

When testing multiple ads Google has three settings optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, and rotate evenly. The third setting “rotate evenly” will now be limited to a 30 day period. After that the ad that is expected to generate the most clicks will be run. The change is designed to deliver the more relevant ads to Google users and deliver a better ROI for advertisers.

The Google Penguin Algorithm Update has Arrived. Here Are Some Penguin-Friendly Link Building Tips

Penguin has arrived on the heels of the Panda 3.6 update. The new updates target so called “over-optimization” e.g. aggressive use of exact match anchor text, low quality article marketing, and high volumes of links from low quality sites. This article focuses on link building methods that will benefit your site in light of the new update. Read the article for more strategies such as leveraging your fanbase, linking to inner pages (the more content, the better), diversified anchor text, focusing on quality over quantity of links and finally making your content link worthy.

Is it OK to Autotweet Your New Blog Posts?

This is something we do for many of our clients through both Facebook and Twitter, so when Google’s Matt Cutts fielded a question regarding this exact topic, our ears definitely perked up. In the video Cutts explained that while excessive abuse of this could be annoying and cause you to lose followers, the practice is 100% Kosher in Google’s eyes.

Are Search Results Too Mainstream? Try Out Million Short!

Million Short is a one of a kind idea for a search engine, although it’s usefulness is debatable. The concept is simple: remove the first million results and give you the stuff Google doesn’t want you to see. Try it out for a laugh.

More Internet Marketing Headlines

Google Maps Business Photos Launched in Canada, Ireland, Netherlands

LinkedIn Acquires Slideshare: Five Predictions for What’s to Follow

Confirmed: Panda Update 3.6 Happened On April 27th

Google’s (Not Provided) Impacting More Than Just SEO Sites

Bing Redesign Simplifies Search Results Pages

Within the digital space with more and more businesses now competing, how do you differentiate?  Ultimately SEO is the key, with this being a key marketing plan for many brands and ever more so for pure play digital brands.  This then brings the important question, should a business outsource this service for expertise, or just hire someone in house, with pros and cons it maybe in fact better for some to actually employ a team of SEOs in house or simply outsource the service.

Hopefully this piece can shed to light some key factors to you understanding what is better.

Why you should have In House SEO

1. An In-house SEO essentially would know your business inside and out, therefore have a better understanding of key priorities, challenges and can get areas an agency may find difficult to sign off, be much quicker.
2. Accessibility is key, knowing that you have complete control over Search Expert, is always good. Knowing you can contact them when plans change means you can quickly adapt.
3. Attention, the SEO employed will just be looking at your website.  This means you get their full attention.

Why you should not Employ In House SEO

1. The industry of search is a constantly changing platform, the algorithms change daily.  So you need to make sure they are kept abreast of the industry, which means spending money in terms of investment.
2. Again following from the first point, it maybe cost ineffective to keeping up with these trends, with SEO being affected by so many different aspects of a firm, SEO maybe pushed on the backburner of any marketing campaign as its true value is not fully recognised.
3. Top agencies invest in thousands of pounds into the best SEO and Analytics packages, if you are in house this would be about the same salary as having an actual person work for you!

Outsourced SEO Pros

1. The biggest advantage of outsourcing your SEO is that after reviewing the potential agencies you can be rest assured that these are some of the very best in terms of skills and knowledge within the industry and are able to create SEO strategies with your business in mind.
2. By outsourcing you SEO no more money would have to be spent on having to spend time and effort into training and tools for the SEO team.
3. Finally, outsourcing your SEO means faster execution of tasks since having a team of experts on your website rather than one / two experts.

Outsourced SEO Cons

1. Outsourcing your search department can be expensive, so you must decide on the ROI, weighing up the costs and your expected return is essential.
2. Accessibility and knowledge, as clients are heavily results, you may not actually speak to your SEO agency that often and have enough knowledge of what they are doing to make it seem worth wild investment.
3. Black Hat SEO, a term and technique that sends chills to most with know in the industry, implementation of these practices could in fact get you black listed from Google if your SEO agency dabbles in these practices.

Ultimately from business to business there will be different pros and cons and it will essentially up to you to decide, if you should outsource or have an in house expert.  With SEO evolving many larger businesses now do both!

Hootsuite is Like a Social Media Agency in Your Browser

Hootsuite differs from other tools; such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic, in that it is a purely browser based tool.  You don’t need to download and install a separate application, and you can access all of your social media profiles via the tool no matter where you are or what computer you’re using, as long as that computer has a fairly modern browser installed.

Schedule, Share, and Post

HootSuite allows you to build a dashboard that displays up to five of your social media streams in one place, for free.  You can link up Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace, WordPress, Foursquare, PingFM, and Mixi feeds.  The basic functionality of HootSuite is free, and if you want to add more feeds, create reports, or allow someone else to use your account (perhaps you want to let your social media agency manage most aspects of your social campaigns but you still want to have an easy way to manage them yourself), then you can upgrade to the Pro Basic service for a nominal fee.

At the time of writing, the Pro Basic service costs $5.99/month.  There are two more tiers of service, called Pro Advanced and Pro Premium, which cost $35.99 and $215.99 respectively.

Hootsuite vs Desktop Apps

Hootsuite stands up well when compared to most desktop Twitter apps.  It’s easy to use, stable, and runs quickly even on Netbooks with fairly limited processing power.

On a feature for feature basis, Hootsuite compares well to Tweetdeck and Seesmic.  There are lots of plugins available for Seesmic that make that particular app quite extensible, and, if you’re willing to use several different services  to get everything that you want out of your social media monitoring system then you can get all of the features of Hootsuite (including some decent reports) for free.  The convenience of getting everything in one place makes it worth considering Hootsuite’s basic pro service, however.

The most appealing feature of Hootsuite, however, is the scheduled posting feature.  While many desktop (and web based, for that matter), clients offer such a feature, Hootsuite’s is the most reliable.  You can allow your social media agency to schedule posts in advance for you, and you don’t have to worry about leaving a computer on, and some software running, for the posts to go out.

You can schedule tweets on a range of other web based services, however all of the ones that I have tried have proven unreliable – either failing to send posts out altogether, duplicating those posts, or sending them out at the wrong times, which could ruin the entire point of your scheduled posting.  Reliability counts, and Hootsuite has it.