inapro.posthaven

getting found. it's a searchable world, so businesses and organizations like to believe that when people are looking for something they provide, their name will pop up. here's a somewhat snide little post that dismisses "the obvious SEO signals" for some less wellknown but pretty easily accomplished tweaks to kick your findability up a notch.

#6 is highlighted here - go to the article for the rest

Images. This is more an addition to Facebook and Google +, but has massive impacts for image search. I personally was having an issue getting certain images to show up on Facebook from my blog, and couldn’t diagnose the issue. Rather than pulling in the images I uploaded for the post, it was pulling in the Social Sharing icons I had set. Bad user experience for anyone else sharing. I found a great plugin to fix the Facebook like thumbnail which brings the images you want to the top, and adds a tag to identify those as the preferred images for the post and for Open Graph.

Do yourself a favor and ensure that the images on your site are descriptive, and they are being picked up by social networks and Google image search.

in our visual world, tweaking the images on your site for seo takes a little extra time but can result in a good branding payoff

Google Image Search

Most search queries in Google image search aren’t very competitive. Well ranked images are seldom the result of great SEO and often sheer luck. The basics of image search are however easy.

Using your keyword in the URL/image name, including it in the alt-/title attribute and placing it within keyword rich textual content is often enough for high ranking. Defining ornamental images as CSS backgrounds makes all the remaining img-tags stand out more. Images on well optimized pages with a lot of link value have the highest chance of scoring.

Only the first 4 to 7 images will appear in regular search results and only when your queries show images, so make sure you outrank everything else.

Branding the Image

Generic images for generic keywords don’t show that one of the images belongs to you. Adding some big logo to the image would really make it stand out more and the branding value of your logo high within the search results can be enormous.

Like Facebook, Google knows that search is moving from keywords and links to providing answers for users to questions such as “Where should I eat?” and “Who can repair my car the best?” That’s why the company has been spending so much time and effort adding expert information from places like Wikipedia and from its own sources like Zagat. But that isn’t social data, and while there has been plenty of debate about the ultimate value of social recommendations, there’s no question that Facebook has a far better grasp of that than Google. And unless Facebook and Twitter choose to change their blockade of the search engine, it is likely to stay that way.

 

Posted by finalwebsites.com -

November 18, 2009

 

 

Posterous is a great hosted Blog system that we talked about in this blog about social media services. The current version has already a lot of features like custom themes and functions for services like Twitter and Facebook.

The best of all their service is still free!

I noticed the last weeks that Google doesn’t index all my Posterous pages and that while I point my blog Prime Blogger to a .com domain name. My first idea was a missing Google Sitemap. I tried before to add my Posterous site to my Google Webmaster Tools account, but this requires a custom meta tag on your homepage or you need to upload a unique file to your site to proof the ownership. I suggested a function for a Google Sitemap to Brett from Posterous  and he gave me the hint that I’m able to change the HTML using a custom theme and yes this is key to get your site accepted in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

Just add your site to your account and choose the meta tag to proof the sites ownership:

 

Next surf to your Posterous site and in the control panel choose your blog -> Settings -> Theme and customize my site -> Advanced.

Paste the meta tag code into the code box at the top. Save the settings and confirm to copy your custom theme settings.

 

Now it’s possible to confirm the website ownership within the Google Webmaster Tools. Next we like to add a sitemap, click Site Configuration -> Sitemaps -> Submit a sitemap

Posterous doesn’t offer a Google sitemap format but you can use the XML feed instead. This gives you not a complete sitemap but at least you can submit the latest 20 blogs to Google. I hope it helps…

 

google, Posterous, sitemaps, themes, webmaster tools

 

Google services, Tutorials

 

Related posts

• A new WordPress theme for our blog
• Optimizing your WordPress Blog for Google: Part 2
• Social media services are more efficient these days

Comments

Trackback URL for this post: http://www.web-development-blog.com/archives/add-a-google-sitemap-for-your-po...

Oh My Heavens ~ THANK YOU!!!! I’ve been trying off and on for over a week to verify my posterous, which I attached to my blog as media.lakepowellrealty.net and just could not figure it out. Thank you!!

Comment by Heather Rankin on January 24, 2010 @ 11:18 am

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It’s becoming more and more important for small business owners to “own” their Google results. In a world where you are what Google says you are, when someone searches for your name they need to be able to find you. The real you. Not a lookalike, another company with the same name or that social profile you thought you had taken care of it. Business owners must protect their brand, and sometimes that means doing just a touch of proactive online reputation management to secure your Google 10.

Your Google 10 is the top ten results that appear when someone does a Google search for your name. How do you go about ensuring you own all ten spots? Surprisingly, it’s not that hard. Here are some of the sites and profiles you’ll want to grab and pay attention to.

great ideas for small businesses! to see the article, please click on the smallbiztrends link above