So how does one take advantage of image marketing? First it is important to understand what/who you are targeting. Image marketing when it comes to the search engines and image marketing for targeting people is very different.

SEO of Images:
Image marketing for image search means understanding how a machine views images. Because a search engine can’t actually understand an image the way we do, it needs to use cues around the image to know how to categorize it. These cues include:
- Alt tag: Make each image uses an alt tag and keep it short and relevant. Preferably use only one keyword phrase.
- body text: The text that surrounds the image gets associated to it. So make sure you theme the content around the keywords you expect people would search when trying to find an image like yours.
- button images/image links: When an image contains a link, the alt tag becomes even stronger and it is seen as anchor text.
- file name: Name your image files with appropriate keywords and use hyphens to separate individual keywords.

Image Marketing for people:
For targeting people image marketing means understanding how people will view the image. Below are common considerations:
- Appeal: Think of who your customers are and what kind of image would appeal to them. Factors that would play a role would be: age, gender, interests, and the location of the potential viewer.
- Timing: Timing is really important with any form of marketing. Images that speak to a current event will get more attention. Twitter trending topics give quick insights into what is relevant now.
- Platform: There are many image based marketing platforms: Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Stumble, Flickr, etc. each have different ways of being utilized for marketing. Try to learn each and how to get the most out of them. Using a site like ping.fm you can send your images to all at once.
- Tone: The tone of image is important. Is the image serious, funny, sad? Playing on people’s is important because you want a reaction. Just remember the action you want is to reflect on you in a positive way.
- Content: The content of image means the message you are trying to convey. Often you can tailor the message by adding text to an image. The text should be short, similar to the way cartoons appear in a newspaper. The goal of images is quick impact too much text can weaken the impact.
- Comments: Sites like FaceBook, Stumble, Flickr, Pinterest allow you to comment on a image. Comment on your own image it will encourage others to do the same and increase the activity it receives.
- Tags: Tags allow you to associate keywords with an image. These will help if people are searching a social site for images that match interest. Some sites will allow you to categorize and add a description of the image as well.
- Connections: When promoting an image socially it is important to be connected. The size of the audience is important when trying to get noticed. So make sure you have a good fan, friend, follower, or connection base.

Remember the goal of image marketing:
Getting a bunch of people to look at your images is great but it isn’t the main goal. The goal of image marketing is to drive people to your web site and use it to convert them to sales. So put images out there, but give the people viewing the images a way to come to your site. Pinterest is good for this because it automatically links the images to the location they are found, just be sure that location is your site. For Twitter and FaceBook create status updates that don’t just contain an image but a story about it. Status updates are limited in length, so start the story in the status update then give a link to the rest of the story, which is really a link to your site.

If you have any questions about image marketing 101 and how it can help your business, please comment below.

However, to really take advantage of Pinterest you need images. Pinterest allows its users to pin photos on the web and comment on them. This makes Pinterest a visual social site where people are interacting through galleries of images. To best take advantage of this new trend you most create images that engage and appeal to women. Why women? Well the US Pinterest user base is 83% women. This explains why my image is of a woman holding a camera rather than me. So to drive traffic to your site involves not only adding new content as text but the utilize images too. Welcome to the age of image marketing.

So the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words may be should be modernized to say its worth a 1000 visitors

Just so you know, if you make this kind of mistake, it is an automated penalty that Google will hit your site with. So if you remove the duplicated content Google will forgive you. From my growing experience in this it seems to take 2-4 months for Google to forgive. There are several factors in this which include competitiveness of the term, page rank of the site (which influences how quickly Google will notice the change), and how many times the content was duplicated.

Resolving the issue of duplicate content involves testing your pages. Traditionally, I would use Google to find duplicate content. This involves grabbing a few lines of text from a site then searching in Google using quotes around that text. However, this doesn’t always work. Spun content will not be detected this way and it can still impact on your rankings. This is why I recommend using Copyscape.com which allows you to enter your URL and check if there are any duplicate pages on the web. It is a very simple tool and shows similarities even with spun content. The more results in copyscape means the more that your page has been copies. So the goal is to make it that copyscape shows no results for a page in question. I also recommend not just testing your homepage but to test all of your major pages.

If you are experiencing problems where your rankings are affected by duplicate content penalties, please feel free to contact me.

To repair a damaged reputation a SEO will often choose to bury it. I have written about ways that this can be done. However, burying an article can be expensive because it is like getting multiple top 20 rankings. So here are some ways to avoid the SEO battle and remove negative content for good.

1) Contact the site:
All web sites are owned by someone and that means that there is a person that can be contacted who has control over the content that appears on the site. A written appeal stating your case sometimes works to get the site owner to pull the page. Also, if you want to play had ball you can remind them that they are entitled to free speech but not slander. The US First amendment protects against libel and the site owner is responsible for the content if it appears on their site whether they wrote it or not. Sometimes drafting a legal looking letter can hammer this point home. If the site doesn’t post contact information then use the whois information about the URL to get the contact information.

2) Contact the ISP?:
Just like the site owner bears responsibility about their site, the hosting company must be responsible about the sites they host. You can actually get sites completely removed by a strong letter to the hosting company. Must hosts will simply remove the offending site rather than deal with any potential legal actions. The host information is also contained in the whois information of a web site.

3) Contact Google:
Google allows people to request the removal of content. You can do so by following the steps located at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663688

If you try all of things and still have problems, call me and I’ll bury the crap out of the offending negative content

So how do we make the Google Panda happy?

First if you have a splash page kill it. Splash pages are a waste, for the search engines, because they lack content and they force the user to make an extra click to get to the information they were looking for. Every click has a standard bounce rate, so a smaller and smaller percentage of users will actually get to the final page. Next make your home page rich in content 500+ words and really define what you do. Don’t babble about welcoming them to your site..they don’t care…all they want is to know how you can help them. So describe your products and services in detail. Be careful though to make sure your main keywords need to appear evenly throughout the content. You still need to keep the main theme of the page or your page will look less relevant to the target keyword.

Hopefully if you follow this method you site will recover from the Panda update and at the same time make your users happier. If you are experiencing problems with the Google Panda please don’t hesitate to contact me and I’ll review your site.

For all those people who actually used Google Wave don’t worry. I imagine Google plus will gradually bring over the ideas developed for Wave. Already the hang outs area of Google Plus is similar to the video sharing of Google Wave. If Google Plus continues to be successful then we should expect more of Google Wave’s features to be brought into the mix.

There is an important note to the Google Wave experiment. Google will pull the plug on something if it doesn’t get the users. Google could have keep Wave alive and let the current user base continue using it. However, Google wants a mass market and failed to see the value of a small group of sophisticated users. The experiment and technology developed could have continued with very little up keep by Google and could of had over time major benefits to the company. I think is it a little sad that company that could make a visionary product like Google Wave could be so limited in its vision.

Goodby Google Wave. R.I.P. May 2009 – April 30, 2012

Click to read my free Google Wave ebook