Notes on adding Photos to Google Places

January 10, 2012 1 Comment

As a business owner:

  • Add photos of a a logo with contact information
  • Source: It’s important to understand that the interaction of a Google Places with photos is different depending on the source of the photo. When you upload your photos logged in to your Places account, then it will gain a stamp
    “From the owner” .
  • Add photos of your location from the street, so those seeing your brick and mortar will be better able to pick out your business, in case they have to park elsewhere if parking space isn’t available.
  • Add photos of your products and service being fulfilled

Filed under Local Search, google places Tagged with ,

Skeletons In Your Website

May 17, 2009 7 Comments

In this last year I worked with a client to put up a website for him for La Quinta, California. As usual I added a sitemap( BTW this site makes quick and easy xml sitemap files) and verified the site with Google’s webmaster tools (Which just underwent an awesome Google facelift and gives more data and feed back than ever).

Pay attention to the bones of your Site: File Names

Well, I just went back and checked in to my Google webmaster tools account and discovered something very strange for this real estate and local centric website for La Quinta, CA…

Pay Attention To File namesI was totally confused why this site had so many different terms that it ranked for for “Skeleton”… Well I did some digging and realized that when I built the site, I had added the background image with the file name “images/skeleton.gif”. The rest of the site has NOTHING to do with skeletons but here Google is giving rankings for a wide mix of terms related to the main content of the page, as well as for terms related to skeletons! For example Google webmaster tools showed me ranking 48 for [Jack Skeleton] from Nightmare Before Christmas, as well as [skeleton in desert] which seemed to have used the geographic context along with the filename. The lesson here for your site is that filen ames are one of the many factors in how Google understands your website, so do everything you can to name them appropriately!

Filed under Content, content writing advice, Google, Search engine advice, Search engine optimization, SES New York, webmaster tools Tagged with , , , ,

Treat Pictures like Visual Content

August 6, 2008 Leave a comment

A Pile of Clothes
Don’t let your Images become a messy pile

Utilizing Images to Enhance your website content

There are many different types of content that people could be looking for online. People looking for the same subject are often going to be searching differently if they want to see different types of site content. With Google’s Universal Search playing a larger and larger role to accomodate these different types of searches, you need to make sure that you are incorporating media properly in your page content. In the Google Webmaster chat about Optimizing Images for Search it became clear that the context of the image is used to help determine it’s relevance to a keyword. So, as you add content to your site, make sure your images aren’t just piled up, and thrown willy nilly about the page. Your images should align with the content to further the message. No one wants to read through blocks of text with no relief. Additionally, that content you’re adding has it’s Alt text(title) description, so that Google can see how that image lines up with the information being conveyed in the text itself.

Filed under content writing advice, Search engine advice Tagged with , , ,

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