Google Instant Preview

Google announced it’s instant preview function on its blog:

With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Over time we’ve made steady improvements to our search results and snippets to help you pick a great page. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a new kind of visual search result we call “Instant Previews” which makes it even faster to choose the right result.

Instant Previews provides a graphic overview of a search result and highlights the most relevant sections, making finding the right page as quick and easy as flipping through a magazine. To use it, click once on the magnifying glass next to the title of any search result and a visual overview of the page will appear on the right. From there, hover your cursor over any other result to see a preview. For those of you who’ve recently stopped using your mouse to search, now you can navigate to a result, hit the right arrow key to see the preview, and hit the down arrow key to keep browsing. Here’s a video showing Instant Previews in action:

Instant preview allows users to look at a site before clicking on it. One more barrier to click through on search results if you’re site shows poorly. Type site:yoursite.com into Google to see what your results look like. It may not be pretty if you have a Flash site.

Google Social Search

In addition to natural Google search results, you might see custom results from your social circle. For example a Google images search result may also return images from the people you are connected to in Flickr, Picassa, Twitter, or Gmail.

The big news here is that other users may see your images or your content in their search results if they are connected to you. And they don’t have to be directly connected to you. They can be Kevin Bacon and still probably see your stuff. Cool thing is that as a user I am more likely to click on results from my social circle because these are people I know and trust.

Get into the social circle of your friends’ searches with a Google Profile. One reason to set this up now is so that someone else doesn’t snatch google.com/profiles/yourname!

Google Place Search

Place Search is a new kind of local search result that organizes the world’s information around places.Google has clustered search results around specific locations so you can more easily make comparisons and decide where to go. If a person searches San Francisco photographer, with Place Search here’s what you’ll get:

The new results are marked with red pins, and each one is a unique restaurant with relevant information and links from across the web, like user reviews and photos. Now information is grouped conveniently to make it easier to digest and compare.

More from the Google Blog.

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It only takes a couple minutes to assess some of the top factors that search engines look at in order to rank a website well. Here’s 10 basic items easy to assess for any website.

1. Page Titles

Do the page titles focus on one key phrase per page, starting with a broad phrase for the homepage and niche phrases for the subpages and blog posts? Since only one page from your site will rank for any given phrase, I make sure you’re not using the same phrase in multiple titles (like – New York wedding photographer in every blog post).

2. Page Meta Descriptions

Page descriptions appear in search results and make the user want to click your link among the tons of search results. Does the meta description use the business name, have a call to action (like “View great photos now”) and give info about the niche and locations served?

3. Backlinks

How difficult will it be to rank given the competition for the major key phrase? I use a backlink checker or Traffic Travis to see how many links the website has and compare that to the number of links by the top couple of ranked sites. If you’re site has 10 links and the #3 site has 100 links, either you have a lot of link building to do or you need to focus on a smaller and less competitive key phrase.

4. Alternate text

Are the images using alternate text to help Google understand what they are about? I check to see if the alternate texts are a single sentence that describes the image, but also use quality keywords and adjectives where possible. On subpages and blog posts, focus on niche keywords rather than broad ones that would only help your rank.

5. Conversion Tactics

If a user finds a page in a search engine, you have one chance form that page to get him to contact/hire you. You can’t rely on the user to click through to your homepage, gallery, or other page. That means every page that could potentially rank in search needs to sell the user on your services and get them to convert (contact you). I suggest including contact information, a short bio, testimonial, and related information (“You may also like…”) in your most popular search pages.

6. Homepage Text

The homepage or splash page needs 300+ words so that Google knows it is legitimate. Think about it, if you are a searcher would you prfer to visit a page with only images, or a page with images and text that explain what you’re looking for? In addition to keyword-rich text it is important to link to your most important search pages (i.e. your top 5 blog posts) to pass as much SEO credit as possible to them from your homepage.

7. URLs

Does the site take advantage of the #2 most important place for keywords? URLs of the pages, blog posts, and even image filenames need quality keywords while excluding “stop” words that Google ignores like “and” or “the”.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but takes a look at some factors you can assess on your website, blog, and images to identify room for SEO growth.

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First, understand a search engine result page (SERP) displays business listings, images, videos, social media mentions, sponsored results, and more. Just look down the left side of Google to view the content types users can search. These also display mixed in with regular results depending on the search phrase. That’s a ton of additional opportunities to be seen on the first page of search. This post talks about 7 Google Account settings every photographer needs to increase search visibility.

Sign up at www.google.com/accounts/ then activate the following settings. My favorite part – control all 7 through a single dashboard.

Google Places

Searchers often see a map of local businesses above the regular search results, at the top of the page. My favorite place to be (at the top). Photographers get tons of business from this traffic and all they did to appear here was activate Google Places. I don’t know the factors to determine who gets first on the map, but I can offer general tips.

• Physical address close to the search phrase (San Francisco address for a San Francisco search)
• Complete profile with quality keywords in the business description, photos, coupons, reviews
• Mentions of the business elsewhere on the web (perhaps superpages, citysearch, yelp)

Google Profiles

Every site has an about page, right? Activate a Google Profile to make an About page right on Google.com. It can help you rank high for searches on your name, even if it is a common one.

Add your social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and Blog to the profile.Those with a profile and are connected to any of those previous sources can see that content in their relevant searches. When I search San Francisco wedding photographer, I see my connections under “Results from your social circle.”

My personal results don’t interest me. My interest is the exposure I get when other people search and see me. The additional exposure catches my audience while they are searching for answers, products, or solutions.

Profiles includes Google Buzz. Like Twitter or Facebook, Buzz is a running list of chatter exposed to those who connect with you. Better than other networks, it aggregates from connected sites, automatically pulling in Tweets, Wall posts, and blog posts without needing to microblog in yet another system. Simply connect all your photography social sites to the profile and let it do the rest.

More resources:

• Darren Rowse profile (Digital Photography School and ProBlogger.net)
• Current Photographer article on Profiles by Trevor Current

Google AdWords

Creating a Google Adwords account gives you an opportunity to buy keywords that can appear at the top or right side of search results pages. I won’t go into the details of how to run adwords, but want to show the opportunity to get on page 1 without showing in organic results.

More resources:

• 8 Success Tips for Photographers by Grover Sanschagrin
• AdWords for Photographers by Rosh Sillars

Google’s YouTube

Lots of searches will show embedded videos on page 1 results. Create videos in YouTube (owned by Google) to increase chances of getting a video to appear in the middle of search. Plus those movies get in front of the millions of searches directly on YouTube.

Google Webmaster Tools

Activate Google webmaster Tools for a direct link to how Google sees your photography site and/or blog. This direct link to Google’s indexing process shows tremendous insight. My 3 favorite aspects are:

• Ability to upload a sitemap (easier with a blog using a sitemap generator)
• Error alerts like malware and broken links
• See what keywords rank well and what words other sites use to link to you

The fact that you have a Webmaster Tools account does not by nature rank a site better, but gives visibility to optimization efforts that help a photographer grow.

Google Analytics

Web metrics is critical to any SEO strategy. Google Analytics offers website metrics like most popular pages, keywords used that people used to get to your site, what sites sent you traffic. Everything a photographer needs to know about it can be found in the report by PhotoShelter.

Google’s Feedburner

Hopefully you already have a blog with an RSS feed. RSS just helps users subscribe to content through feed readers and other services that often have advantages over email. Feedburner rounds out the last setting photographers need to activate. It comes in handy for tracking RSS subscribers as well as retaining existing RSS users if you plan to move blog sites or change a domain name. Not too much relevance to SEO in this, other than the people on the internet that create links (helpful to SEO) typically are the techie types like me that monitor content from multiple sources via feeds.

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Site Search

A quick Google search can also reveal a hack. Simply type site:yoursite.com to return a list of all pages that Google has indexed for a site. If you see pages about prescriptions that you don’t have on your site (usually on the last page if results), then locate and delete. In this case I found a folder hidden deep within the server files called /store/api/config/23 with over 50 html files advertising prescriptions.

Screenshot of hacked search results

That’s a lot of prescription webpages you don’t want search engines to see as connected to you. They don’t want to return spam pages in search results and may throw out your real content with them!

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools (free) tells you if your site has been compromised under Diagnostics > Malware.

Malware Message in Webmaster Central

Although “no malware detected” does not mean your site is free of hacked content. The example above showed no Malware in Google Webmaster Tools but did have all the spam pages still.

Source Code

Take a look at the source code of your homepage, visible by clicking View > Source from the menu at the top of your browser. Make sure there is nothing in the page that looks odd. If you’re not that technical you may want to have a web developer inspect the code. Jump to minute 15 in this Google video where SEO experts including Matt Cutts review a handful of websites for SEO. He quickly identifies one of them as being hacked by noticing a small line of Javascript.

Here is what the video shows, an example of hidden Javascript:

Prevention Tips

Here are a couple of common ways to make it harder for people to take over your site:

• Don’t allow search to find your login pages. The Robots Meta Plugin for WordPress offers an easy way to add noindex to blog logins
• Make sure your blog software is always up to date by upgrading to the latest version of WordPress when prompted
• Check in with Google Webmaster Tools to insure crawlers are able to index your site
• Do a periodic Google search for your site to make sure no new content has been added

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Amazon knows I like “The Office” TV show and murder mystery novels. Then again, Who doesn’t?

What is Personalized Search?

I very well may purchase Templar Salvation because it showed in my personalized Amazon products because it perfectly fits the style of books I like. In this case, these custom search results deliver higher sales for Amazon. Google works the same way. Personalized search looks at your search history and click through patterns to elevate certain listings up the ranks – just for you (or your computer).

Now when you search using Google, we will be able to better provide you with the most relevant results possible. For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I’m looking for news about Cornell University’s sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

With quality Google listings, you trust it more as a search engine, continue to use it, and Google makes more money from the paid search results that the average user will select 10% of the time.

Previously, one had to be logged into a Google account to get this skew, but in late 2009 Google offered Personalized Search to Everone.

I see a couple applications for this information. First, is to make sure the rank you see for your own site is accurate. It would be a major mistake to go touting a #1 rank, when only you can see it. I’ve accidentally told clients about their successful SEO, only to realize my results put them on page 1 instead of page 3. Normally the variance is not too significant, but can make a big difference when the #1 result gets 40% of clicks and the #10 result gets 3% of clicks.

How to Turn Off Google Personalization

Without a Google account, click the Web History link at the top of the page and then Disable customizations based on search activity. If signed in, the same link enables you to Pause or Remove the history. I don’t like this method because I want better search 99% of the time… just not when I’m searching for my own stuff. Thank Yoast for developing a solution. He has a search plugin enabling you to search without personalization as needed from your toolbar. I just tried it for a niche phrase and the site I was looking for ranked 56 without personalization and 50 with it turned on.

Using Personalization to Your Advantage

The other application of this data is to get your sites to show more often in the searches of your customers. To accomplish this, they need to be searching for you. One way I make this happen is by putting a search phrase on my business card instead of my domain name. I want users to search and find me, then click on the result, rather than going to my site directly. It helps with overall rank (slightly) when you get good click through on your listing. The front of my business card says google: photography seo. It’s pretty risky because if I ever slip before the #1 rank, customers might not find me, and even when I am #1 they may see my competitors in the list and click on them instead. But being an SEO specialist, I like to experiment with the techniques before recommending them. Not willing to eliminate your domain from your business card? Perhaps tell (verbally) select people what to search for to find you if they ask the name of your website. This reminds me of old advertising by AOL who would say type AOL keyword XYZ to get to a website.

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The text you use in the alt attribute has a multiplication affect because it counts as important text on the page (helping your page rank), adds keyword credit when the image is linked, and may help your images appear in Google image searches. Make sure to read my post 5 Things to Know When Writing Photo Alt Text for more on that subject.

Matt Cuts from Google gives his own explanation and rationale for alternate attributes in this video, saying to use them on ALL IMAGES!

Alt text is displayed in HTML as

<img src=”/image.jpg” alt=”Short description of the image” title=”Text that appears on mouse over” />

You may have noticed the title attribute in the above tag. Google Webmaster Central explains in its post, Using Alt Attributes Smartly:

Some of you have asked about the difference between the “alt” and “title” attributes. According to the W3C recommendations, the “alt” attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. The “title” attribute is a bit different: it “offers advisory information about the element for which it is set.” As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the “alt” attribute. Feel free to supplement the “alt” attribute with “title” and other attributes if they provide value to your users!

Let me read through the technical speak here and say that you mainly need to focus on the alternate text and not worry much about the title text. If it makes you feel better, I rarely use title text for my images (but I always use alt text).

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Social Search – Custom Results Based on Your “Circle”

In addition to natural Google search results, you might see custom results from your social circle. For example a Google images search result may also return images from the people you are connected to in Flickr, Picassa, Twitter, or Gmail.

The big news here is that other users may see your images or your content in their search results if they are connected to you. And they don’t have to be directly connected to you. They can be Kevin Bacon and still probably see your stuff. Cool thing is that as a user I am more likely to click on results from my social circle because these are people I know and trust. Hint: you need to get your content into those results. Enter Google Profiles.

Google Profiles Populate the Social Search

Google Profiles (www.google.com/profiles) is yet another Google add on you pretty much have to have. You can use your same Google account as your gmail, Google Analytics, etc. One reason to set this up now is so that someone else doesn’t snatch google.com/profiles/yourname! View my Google profile. Here is a quick video from Google about how and why you would want a Google profile.

I had been using social search for the last month or so in Google labs before it was released broadly in beta. I built out my profile… waited… I didn’t notice anything spectacular. No custom search content for me. Then I realized I didn’t have any contacts populated in my Google account, which is an easy mistake to make because gmail remembers all your addresses without you having to group them ad friends. Now I’ve added a bunch of you as friends and am expecting much better results (Google says it takes a couple weeks). I’m glad I could be the guinea pig and not you.

Populating your profile with lots of contacts and content will only help your own personal search results. See a list of your social circle connections at google.com/s2/search/social. Just connect your main accounts in the links section then your job is done.

As more and more people add Google profiles and those people are following you in other networks (or know people who are), your visibility will increase. It will take a long time for that all to happen, so if you follow my lead then claim your profile name now, build it out a little bit, and then maybe sometime down the line you might see some potential return. I would rather be established now than scrambling later.

Zach recommends Google Blog: Search is Getting More Social

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Example of a Google Local Listing

After Rochelle read my Photographers SEO Book, she understood the importance of multiple listings, Google local, and other local websites. She created a second website on a new domain, and submitted it to Google local. With under an hour of work she was ranked at the top of the page for the competitive term “rome wedding photographer” and she also has a page 2 rank for the same term in the regular results.

Rome Wedding Photographer in Google Local

High Position, Double Rank, Plus Free Link

As you can see, Google local listings can give you a very high result on the page in addition to your regular search results rank – that’s 2 places your site now appears so they are very important! Plus this local listing provides a visible link to your website (the main ingredient). As you know from my posts on linkbuilding for photographers every additional quality link you can get for your website will be very valuable to your search results.

Picking Your Address

The position of your business within the local listing (A, B, or C, etc) depends partly on your address. So of course if you want to show up for a Rome photography search, you should not be using a Florence address.

What if you work out of your home, or don’t have a storefront in the city you want to rank for? I can tell you that Google local will validate your listing in one of two ways. It validates that you are a legitimate business by sending a postcard to the address you submitted or it makes an automated phone call to the phone number you submitted and gives you a PIN number that you use to activate your listing. So Google does not really know if you are physically located in that city or not. To be honest, I have not received one call or piece of mail based on my local listing, but have received significant click through to my website link. I think your listing will serve the same purpose.

Tips for a Successful Photographer’s Local Listing

Following these steps will help you get the most out of your Google local account

1. Use your location in your business name. For example: Zach’s Wedding Photography, San Diego
2. Add a photo or a few photo examples with your listing
3. Add a coupon
4. Add as much detail as possible when it asks you. Trivial details like hours of operation, years in service, memberships and associations can all help Google and your users1
5. Use keywords in your description (wedding, photographer, bride, engagement, reception, photos, images, etc)
6. Get users to review your business once it is listed (family, friends, clients, etc)

Ready to Start Getting Better Search Results

Now you are amped up about Google Local, so get started at http://www.google.com/local/add/. You can repeat the successful steps above for the additional local sites, like Yahoo local.

This is just one small tip that can be found in the Photographers SEO Book. If you’re looking to take the confusion out of Google rankings, optimize your homepage text, and get more links back to your website or blog then my ebook is perfect for you.

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