SEO News-Traffic from Image Searches

"Search Engine Journal" - 4 new articles

Google Suggest Becomes More Local and Better with Spelling

Google has just rolled out two nifty features of its Google Suggest service – a more localized search suggest that boils down to metro areas and an auto-correction of spellings for name search. These two new features aimed to give you a faster search experience when typing your search keywords as well as lessen the amount of time you devote typing these searches.

The localization feature is actually a spin-off of previous Google Suggest feature which was limited by country searches. The new Google Suggest local feature was tailored to specific metro areas in the U.S. This means that when you type in a specific keyword Google search immediately analyzes your search term based on your location.
Google gave a good example when searching for the keyword -”bulls.” If you are currently located in Chicago will typing this keyword, Google will quickly pull out it’s suggested keywords based on all things about Chicago. The assumption is that you are looking for Chicago Bulls-related infromation via Google search. So, all the terms suggested by Google will be related to the Chicago Bulls team.
The other new feature of Google Suggest has something to do with spelling enhancement. So, when you are searching for a general term such as “composer” Google will pull out several search suggestion which include the name of the composer. Basically the new feature makes use of the concept that people often know something about a person besides the approximate spelling of his name.
Aside from this new Google Suggest feature, Google also rolled out an auto-correct feature which lead you to the online entry for that keyword even though the spelling is correct.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Suggest Becomes More Local and Better with Spelling

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Why You Need to Stop Ignoring Image Alt Attributes

This is a guest post by AJ Wilcox of OrangeSoda, an internet marketing and search marketing company that specializes in local search and SEO for small business.
As you are coding your site, you most often get the necessary stuff in, and then sweep back for all the leftovers. Quite often, developers forget to add the alt="" attribute to images because it's not required to appear completed. Since image alts are not visible to the majority of searchers, they're easy to forget.
I'd like to cover why you shouldn't forget about them, or why you should go input them now.

Traffic from Image Searches

How do you think Google classifies images in order to display in images.google.com when a searcher enters a keyword? A few options come to mind. They can pull the filename (ie. Bluecar.jpg will likely be relevant when someone searches for 'blue car'), text surrounding the image, the alt text, and they can inspect the image digitally (their technology is improving fast). By including your page keywords in your alt text, you raise your chances of showing up in image searches, and getting subsequent visitors from those image searches.

The Visually Impaired

Users who are blind have browsers that read the page text aloud. When the browser comes to an image, if there is no alt text, the browser can't add to the user's experience. Visually impaired users should definitely be able to get the gist of images like the rest of us, so take a few minutes and write some descriptive alt text.

Google Usability Love

What is Google's goal? They are first and foremost a business, so they want to make money. They make a good 98% of their money through paid ads. The more users on Google properties, the more chances that users will click their ads, and add to the bottom line. The better the experience that users have surfing sites through Google, the more they will return. Of course it makes sense for Google to reward complete, fully-usable content to hover near the top of their indexes.

Rankings

Keyword usage in image alt text is classified as having minimal importance by a consortium of SEO experts, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. It is yet another opportunity to declare your relevance to your given keyword. The little things add up to big things together, so don't ignore them. Personally, I feel that image alt text plays a larger role than most on-site factors due to the previous point about usability, but that's personal opinion.
So there you have it, don't forget your image alt text.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Why You Need to Stop Ignoring Image Alt Attributes

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Search & Social-Largest Sponsor of Foursquare Day Tampa!

Tampa, The epicenter of foursquare day (#4sqday), will be erupting with foursquare fun-ness! Search & Social has decided to sponsor this event today (April 16th) by donating a free ticket to be raffled off for our Spring Summit! We donated the largest prize there. You can obtain raffle tickets by either checking in at the event or doing the puzzle piece search throughout town. The Foursquare day idea got kick started by optometrist and social media lover Nate Bonilla-Warford. Once his idea was thrown out into the internet world, it was tossed around and mulled over by many people, until he met with a series of key players who helped bring his idea to a reality.
Brought to you in part as well by Girls in Tech and Creative Loafing, this fun filled social media holiday will be taking place all around town. If you want to find and support a local business that’s participating with awesome 4sqday deals, you can find them on the 4sqday Tampa page. One thing that we’re trying to do, in order to support the city of Tampa and let everyone know we’re a big town with a little name, is to attempt to get the “Super Swarm” badge by having 250+ people check in to our swarm event. The swarm event is from 6-9PM tonight (Friday, April 16th) is located at the Hyatt @ 211 North Tampa Street. Tampa, FL 33602.
There are numerous fun filled challenges going on, so checkout the 4sqday Puzzle Hunt going on, to win a raffle ticket, and make sure you check-in to the Swarm Event! Don’t worry if you can’t play with puzzle piece game… by checking in to the swarm event tonight you’ll be eligible for a raffle ticket too!
Thao and I (from search & social) will be doing check-ins, so if you decide to come by, say hi!
You can also follow the Creative Loafing Street Team on twitter, @cl_streetteam, because if you can find them, they’ll be giving away fun stuff!
As always, you can follow me @esvienne and Thao Tran @Thaott.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Search & Social-Largest Sponsor of Foursquare Day Tampa!

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Easier Annotate, Recap and Re-Blog Pages with Yooper (FireFox)

If you are an active blogger, you must be reading and processing plenty of information daily.
You save some of this information by copying-pasting to whichever notes you are managing or by bookmarking the page or saving the link. You go by most of the information to forget about it forever.
With such flood of the information you should have plenty of hacks on how to process it quickly and efficiently. Today I am adding one more to your arsenal: a tool for fun web annotating.
Yooper is a nice FireFox addon that lets you easily highlight text on the page and the easily save it online. The best features of the tool are those that allow to quickly copy all page highlights and also to easily search through all your previously made highlights.
Lets see it in action.
Install the addon here, re-start your browser and notice a new toolbar in your FireFox status bar:

The first thing you want to do is to login to Yooper using your open ID (I was using Google). Once you are logged in, you will notice that the very first icon in the Yooper toolbar becomes green.
Now, just go test it. Open any page and highlight key sentences and phrases as you read. You will see that parts of the text you highlight becomes yellow (you can change the default color if you want to):

Once done, click the green icon in the toolbar and choose “View the summary”:

You will be taken to the page summary where you can see all your previous highlights, copy any of them and share any of them:

You can search the highlights (the feature runs pretty smoothly!):

Some points you need to be aware of:

The tool won’t highlight the text if you copy it (it is assumed that you selected the text for another purpose);
You can disable automatic highlighting (Which is what I ended up doing because there was too much “extra” highlighting I didn’t need);
The tool is highly customizable: you can change the color, disable auto-highlighting, etc.
I wasn’t able to get some of the features work properly (for example, “Share by email” link doesn’t copy the highlights to email body) but overall the tool turned out quite useful.

Let me know what you think!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Easier Annotate, Recap and Re-Blog Pages with Yooper (FireFox)