Do you remember the address to that favourite Gelato shop in your city? Many of you who don’t know, you most likely will visit Google Maps to find it. Well, today Google launched a new search feature called Places Search. Place Search presents information in the search results in a new fashion. The best way for you to understand is to see a comparison of the old and the new.
OLD
NEW
You can see a few noticeable changes:
The map is not shifted to the right side and is no longer in the center
The map scrolls down with you
Organic results (results under the map) are now clustered in with the map results, pushing it even further down the page
Review stars and a blub about the business is shown
As Google begins unveiling this new search feature to different parts of the world, there will be major SEO implications that will affect your marketing strategy on the Internet. For example, information that used to be above the fold is no longer the case, you will need to do more work to get your business ranked higher.
How do you feel about Place Search? Do you think it will benefit local businesses? Or is Google moving in the wrong direction? Share your thoughts in the comment box below.
If you are a business, blogger, or even a student working on a project, then you've probably gone out and searched for images on the web. We hope search engines give us the results we want, whether it be an image of a boat, car, or photos from an event.
There are some basic SEO tactics that you can use on your images to help others find them better. Image SEO is all about telling search engines what the image is about, so they can better index the image and get found by the users who need them the most. Here are some things to look out for:
1. ALT Text – when you're uploading a file, you'll be asked for an ALT text (alternative text) for the image. This text is displayed when the image cannot be rendered in the user's browsers. It happens often in emails (RSS feeds) and on mobile devices. It is important to keep your ALT text short, but descriptive.
2. Filename - give your filename a meaningful title and be descriptive. Filenames are not as important as ALT text, but still important enough to consider it in your overall image SEO. Most of the time, your filenames will be converted into a timestamp (a bunch of weird numbers), but if you are uploading your images to a directory or folder within a domain, the filename could do wonders for you.
3. Surrounding Text – make sure the surrounding text is pointing to your image. One might wonder why you've included an image in your content if it has not relation to what you are talking about. Often times when your image appears in the Google Image search result, the result of that image will point back to the page with the image. Be prepared that the user may be looking for more information about that image.
4. Inbound Links - if your image is search engine optimized, your image will appear in the Google Image results pages for your targeted term. If you had embedded the image on a page, it will point the user to your page, creating more inbound links to your page. Getting quality inbound links is important to help your page rank higher in search engines.
5. Human Categorization – we all categorize things, and so we want search engines to understand what our images are about so they can be places properly across the web. Use words that are associated with the image.
Image SEO is especially important to photographers. They often have plenty of images on one page of their website (like a gallery). A gallery is said to be overwhelming and thus those pages don't get indexed as well. In order to separate it, I have advised photographers to start a blog and upload their images to posts. Each posts will be dedicated to a unique event, allowing a few shots per post, and thus per page. Take full advantage of using categories option so your users can find your areas of specialty better. Oh, and don't forget to specify ALT attributes to each photo!
If you've got other suggestions for photographers or basic image SEO tactics, please share your comments below.
Have you tried out the new Groups application on Facebook yet? Or maybe you've already been a victim of their 'uncontrolled invitation' feature. More and more Facebook users are beginning to see the dark side of this new application, me being in between of the whole controversy.
I've created a both a private and public Facebook Group just to test out the different features. I've been fiddling around with this application for the past hour and here are my findings:
You can easily identify all their menu options along the top right, and left hand sides. They've moved away from tabs. Instead, they are creating links along the left side with a list of your groups and applications. The page is one long feed where members have the ability to share a post, link, photo video, event and doc file. You can easily access the Facebook chat, add friends to the group or leave the group from the right panel. The thing to keep in mind with this new Group application is that the goal is to encourage information Sharing. Remember Mark's mission? "I'm trying to make the world a more open place by helping people connect and share." Are we achieving that? It looks like we are moving closer to it.
There is no longer information to read on about the group. The new Facebook Group eliminates static content like Information, Category, and Description about the group. Is this a good thing? Well let's hope that you know the people in the group you are apart of. No static content means fresh new content is being posted on the discussion board. Isn't that what we all want? Do you remember when you used to get together in groups to work on school projects? Were you always carrying around a syllabus and reading it each time you get together? No, it's because we know what the group (class) is about and we move on to discuss different things. It only makes sense to start conversations that are unique and interesting.
You can invite anyone to your groups. There is no approval process. So there is a chance you could be added by one of your friends to a group you didn't want to be apart of? What do you then? Leave and disappoint your friend? Or leave with frustration and never talk to that friend who invited you in the first place? It would be better to get notified about new Group invites (like the old Facebook Groups) than hand over control to members of the group to automatically add someone, without approval.
The privacy setting for sharing photos don't seem to be so private, in my opinion. Although it is very complex to determine the link URL to an image, it is still accessible to the public. Are these images being indexed? Possibly. I've made this comment because I noticed a link below an image I uploaded to my private group. Essentially my members can share the photo with the public using that URL.
You can easily get bombarded by a pile of unread notifications from the new Groups. But all this talk about SPAM can be fixed with a minor tweak in your Groups settings. I've subscribed to my first group (Tweeps) because I am actively having a conversation with a few colleague of mine, figuring the ins and outs of the new application. At the same time, we know that our conversation is being published to our network, we know that and don't mind it.
For those who want to turn off their email notifications, go to your group, click Edit Settings and uncheck 'Email notifications to: you@mail.com'.
It looks like we can't create our own URL for our groups just yet. Will that ever be a feature for the Groups application Facebook?
That sums up my findings in the last hour with the new tool. I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. Do you like it? Don't like it? Why?
If I missed something, please share them in the comment box below.
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