by Les Kollegian

Chris Crum reported for Web Pro News that Google is finally getting the biggest missing piece in real-time search. At Jacob Tyler, we are doing our best daily to make our clients aware of the importance of Social Networking (Social Media) as a part of their marketing mix. This is even more proof that developing “Fan Pages” in Facebook wil increase the possibility of first page placement for your Web site or business organic search results as explained below.

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine’s real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google’s real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed. This includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren’t being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren’t only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google’s real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook’s huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn’t dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.

by Jonathan Marshall

This video came out a year ago, but we missed it, so we’re bringing it back. It’s a fake TV spot done by British animatronics master John Nolan (the man who worked on Where the Wild Things Are, among other films).

It shows a mouse having a predictably nasty run-in with a trap – but that’s just the beginning of the story. It’s worth pushing through to the end, even for the squeamish. Nolan used a live mouse for the opening shots and animatronics for the rest.

Even though this commercial never made it to production, it turned into an extremely popular viral video. With almost 1,000,000 views, the creative agency that re-purposed the Nolan’s Cheese video into their social media strategy would consider this a viral success. The YouTube sensation spread quickly through 1000s of social media outlets, and most Social Media professionals would say this fake spot just goes to show – sometimes a questionable/risky TV spot can become a successful viral video…

by Les Kollegian

I attended an AIGA event today with speaker Arthur Schwartz from Techno Power Marketing entitled “How to Design and Implement a Successful Social Media Strategy“. Very good presentation with some great concepts. I wanted to point out a video he used to open the discussion which I will show the next client that asks me “How would using social media create ROI for my business?” For those of you interested in social media, this video is great and frankly the numbers are staggering.

by Les Kollegian

We work hard to educate our clients about SEO and when Jacob Tyler handles Web site design, we always do our best to handle all aspects of proper on-site SEO during the initial development. This includes Meta and Title tags, as well as appropriate page and image naming based on our clients keywords that work best for their business. Many Web Designers overlook this important stage of the process and frankly out of sheer laziness, don’t name images appropriately to enhance organic search engine optimization. Sage Lewis from Click Z wrote an excellent article called “The Four Keys to Image SEO Success“. Below he gives some of the important aspects of developing proper SEO on image tags. If you are interested in this topic, please follow him as he seems to always have the right idea. Below is a sample line of code that is on the Jacob Tyler Web site that shows how we name pages, images, alt, and title tags.

Anyway, this is what he said:

I have this nasty habit of making, what I think are, casual remarks that lead to a bit of controversy. In my last column, I wrote: “Putting key phrases in image ALT tags or comment tags does little good.”

A couple people thought that wasn’t right. For example, IslandsT wrote:
I like the rest of your ideas and they are great except this one:- ‘Putting key phrases in image ALT tags does little good’. Only little good? Do you know that this is one of the most important factors in SEO nowadays? Image search is so important and can always helps us to get extra traffic to our online blog. My point of reference is so often connected to the concept that search engine optimization primarily refers to the blue text links in the search engines. That is an outdated perspective.

SEO (define) takes so many shapes these days. That doesn’t make this conversation as clear and straightforward as one might like, however.

SEO refers to many things:

* Video optimization

* Local optimization

* Real-time optimization

* And most definitely, image optimization

This fact came home to me this past week when a new client discussed all the traffic they were getting from image search.

I’m not talking about some hip hop music site. These people fabricate a niche, industrial product. Only people that knew about this industry would do searches for these kinds of products.

Image search is becoming a significant driver of traffic. This is amusing because, not long ago, clients were asking me how to stop search engines from indexing their images. They didn’t want all that pesky server traffic. If that line of thinking makes sense to you, the easiest way of stopping search engines from indexing your images is adding something like this to your robots.txt file.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

If your images are all located in a single directory such as “images,” this little bit of code will pretty much stop all those nosy search spiders from finding all your juicy images.

You can also specifically designate the Google image spider to stop accessing any of your site using this code in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

Just don’t somehow mash those two pieces of code together. I highly discourage something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That will save you a ton of server traffic by telling all search spiders to not bother spidering or indexing anything in your site.

All that said, you would have to make a pretty strong case to me as to why in the world you wouldn’t want image search traffic. The point of your Web site is to market your business. While image search takes a bit of “out-of-the-box” thinking, it doesn’t take a mental giant to arrive at the conclusion: traffic is traffic.

So, how do you go about scooping up all this image search traffic?

Fortunately for us, Google has done a nice job laying out all the general tips and tricks.

Here are the highlights, which culminates as the four keys to image search optimization success:

* Create detailed, informative file names. If you upload images from your camera, they are often named things like: img00234.JPG. This doesn’t tell anything about the image. A better option would be something like: hp-95-ink-cartridge.jpg.

* Create detailed, informative image alt tags. With our ink cartridge example, you might say something like: .

But you also don’t want to go overboard with something like this:

You run the risk of looking like you’re stuffing key words in the alt tag. This could throw up a spam flag.

* Create detailed, informative anchor text. Anchor text (the text pages use to link to your site) gives the search engines a clear understanding of where they’re about to go. So, if our HP Ink Cartridge page had a link to it from another page on your site, you might link to it like this: HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge.

* Create clear context for your image. Google says it best: Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to make sure that images are placed near the relevant text. In addition, we recommend providing good, descriptive titles and captions for your images.

People rarely make use of the title attribute for images. The w3schools.com describes its use like this:
The alt attribute is meant to be used as an alternative text if the image is not available, not as a mouse-over text. To show a mouse-over text on images or image-maps, use the title attribute, like this: .

Google is clearly stating that the title attribute plays a role in optimization, so I strongly encourage you to consider using it.

According to w3.org, there is no HTML element for a caption. So, you might do something like this:

COMPATIBLE HP 95 Tri-color Ink Cartridge. This is a Remanufactured HP 95 (C8766WN) Color Inkjet cartridge. For HP Deskjet, OfficeJet, PSC, Photosmart printers.

Taking time to do these things could significantly help you get a bunch more image search traffic.