img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-953″ title=”photographing-the-photographer-naixn” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/photographing-the-photographer-naixn.jpg” alt=”photographing-the-photographer-naixn” width=”500″ height=”333″ />

Photographing the Photographer by /a>.

Photographers and other visual artists have a magnificent tool to show off their work these days, the Internet. Everybody loves great photos and artworks so they spread basically by themselves.

Still there is a big difference between being successful on the Web as a photographer or visual artist and having your images scattered randomly over the Web. Image SEO is a great tool to decide yourself which way your work gets on the Web.

Most good images get stolen and used without your permission

to generate ad revenue for the content thieves while you not only earn nothing financially but don’t getting any publicity either due to lack of proper credits.

The best way to become successful is to

use your images as free advertising

for your name while earning money with professional services or premium products, /a> for print purposes for instance. Today I want to focus on the ways of promoting your work over the Web to get links and publicity while at the same time curbing image theft of your works.

Add your email address to your Flickr profile, the same applies to Deviant Art. I often want to seek permission for use of images but do not find a way to contact the photographer or artist. Where there is no way to ask or buy people will just take images without permission or ignore you. I do the latter and search for other images instead. Also add “more at youraddress.com” links below each of your images on Flickr.

Do not use LinkedIn as the only way to contact you, only premium members can send you images. So people relying solely on LinkedIn to get messages will get just get a tiny part of them. Unless you don’t care provide an email address or at least some form address like formspring.me

Use /a> and similar portfolio community sites and make sure to use you real name plus, again, add your email and homepage address there.

Add your URL or name to images. Add a text layer in Photoshop or using another tool saying something like youraddress.com or copyright by youraddress.com People who steal images tend to add their URLs so in the best case scenario you make sure that people understand the image is yours by saying something like your name, photography.

Submit your images to /a> and socialize with like minded users there. In case you don’t submit them others will, without your permission and proper credits at worst. So make sure you are the first and foremost who submits them with the proper source.

Cut out the middleman e.g. Getty Images. Why? I’ve contacted Getty Images a week ago to seek permission to publish an image and I didn’t get a response beyond an automated “we get back to you” reply. Also /a> that only mainstream media can afford them so by selling there you actually make sure that you don’t sell many images. Retain ownership of your images and decide on a case to case basis how much to charge.

Use /a> to find out who uses and steals your images. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that allows you to search for an image just by uploading it or linking it. So you don’t use keywords but only the image itself.

Use StumbleUpon and Tumblr etc. to spread your images yourself, reprimand users who steal your images. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are notorious for wide spread image theft. Most people who submit your images don’t care for copyright on earn money by stealing them and showing them along their ads. Especially /a> to rip off photographers and artists.

Use a /a> to control the use of your images. Creative Commons licenses are not about giving away your copyrights, they are about deciding yourself what copyrights you grant others. This is far better than letting people steal your images. Let the people use the images with your permission and you get plenty of links, especially with those licenses requiring attribution.

Build your own homepage and display your images there. While many photographers aren’t web designers or can not afford expensive web design there are many services where you can set up a homepage easily. Some of them are even specialized on image content. Without a homepage you will always depend on third parties like Flickr, Behance etc. Flickr might ban you or delete your images. Many images simply get censored because they show parts of the human body. So Flickr etc. are good to spread the word but not to represent you.

Don’t let Google Images steal your images. Use a so called /a> to ensure Google Image search users are routed to your site and do no stay on the Google page that frames you.

Apply basic /a> on site to make people find your images on your website.

These simple and often quite obvious measures will already provide you with plenty of links and publicity. It takes time to use all these tools. Even adding your URL to your images can be quite tedious but you also can automate it. Some people ma not call these techniques image SEO at all but at the end of the day it is.

In the age of social media SEO is about findability, digital asset optimization wherever your assets are and off site optimization does not mean only link building.

That’s SEO 2.0

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-953″ title=”photographing-the-photographer-naixn” src=”http://seo2.0.onreact.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/photographing-the-photographer-naixn.jpg” alt=”photographing-the-photographer-naixn” width=”500″ height=”333″ />

Photographing the Photographer by /a>.

Photographers and other visual artists have a magnificent tool to show off their work these days, the Internet. Everybody loves great photos and artworks so they spread basically by themselves.

Still there is a big difference between being successful on the Web as a photographer or visual artist and having your images scattered randomly over the Web. Image SEO is a great tool to decide yourself which way your work gets on the Web.

Most good images get stolen and used without your permission

to generate ad revenue for the content thieves while you not only earn nothing financially but don’t getting any publicity either due to lack of proper credits.

The best way to become successful is to

use your images as free advertising

for your name while earning money with professional services or premium products, /a> for print purposes for instance. Today I want to focus on the ways of promoting your work over the Web to get links and publicity while at the same time curbing image theft of your works.

Add your email address to your Flickr profile, the same applies to Deviant Art. I often want to seek permission for use of images but do not find a way to contact the photographer or artist. Where there is no way to ask or buy people will just take images without permission or ignore you. I do the latter and search for other images instead. Also add “more at youraddress.com” links below each of your images on Flickr.

Do not use LinkedIn as the only way to contact you, only premium members can send you images. So people relying solely on LinkedIn to get messages will get just get a tiny part of them. Unless you don’t care provide an email address or at least some form address like formspring.me

Use /a> and similar portfolio community sites and make sure to use you real name plus, again, add your email and homepage address there.

Add your URL or name to images. Add a text layer in Photoshop or using another tool saying something like youraddress.com or copyright by youraddress.com People who steal images tend to add their URLs so in the best case scenario you make sure that people understand the image is yours by saying something like your name, photography.

Submit your images to /a> and socialize with like minded users there. In case you don’t submit them others will, without your permission and proper credits at worst. So make sure you are the first and foremost who submits them with the proper source.

Cut out the middleman e.g. Getty Images. Why? I’ve contacted Getty Images a week ago to seek permission to publish an image and I didn’t get a response beyond an automated “we get back to you” reply. Also /a> that only mainstream media can afford them so by selling there you actually make sure that you don’t sell many images. Retain ownership of your images and decide on a case to case basis how much to charge.

Use /a> to find out who uses and steals your images. TinEye is a “reverse image search engine” that allows you to search for an image just by uploading it or linking it. So you don’t use keywords but only the image itself.

Use StumbleUpon and Tumblr etc. to spread your images yourself, reprimand users who steal your images. StumbleUpon and Tumblr are notorious for wide spread image theft. Most people who submit your images don’t care for copyright on earn money by stealing them and showing them along their ads. Especially /a> to rip off photographers and artists.

Use a /a> to control the use of your images. Creative Commons licenses are not about giving away your copyrights, they are about deciding yourself what copyrights you grant others. This is far better than letting people steal your images. Let the people use the images with your permission and you get plenty of links, especially with those licenses requiring attribution.

Build your own homepage and display your images there. While many photographers aren’t web designers or can not afford expensive web design there are many services where you can set up a homepage easily. Some of them are even specialized on image content. Without a homepage you will always depend on third parties like Flickr, Behance etc. Flickr might ban you or delete your images. Many images simply get censored because they show parts of the human body. So Flickr etc. are good to spread the word but not to represent you.

Don’t let Google Images steal your images. Use a so called /a> to ensure Google Image search users are routed to your site and do no stay on the Google page that frames you.

Apply basic /a> on site to make people find your images on your website.

These simple and often quite obvious measures will already provide you with plenty of links and publicity. It takes time to use all these tools. Even adding your URL to your images can be quite tedious but you also can automate it. Some people ma not call these techniques image SEO at all but at the end of the day it is.

In the age of social media SEO is about findability, digital asset optimization wherever your assets are and off site optimization does not mean only link building.

That’s SEO 2.0

Related posts:

1. /a>
2. /a>
3. /a>

Link:
/a>

Who is going to pay to tell people that they are good enough and their lives are fine as they are? A fundamental truth of advertising is that advertising the truth usually isn’t very profitable – which is why there is lead generation, affiliate programs, public relations, negative billing options, small print, bogus medical research, and so on…

Ever wonder how an SEO professional can charge first world rates to do do third rate, third world work and still get a top rating from a heavily advertised SEO rating website? Edward Lewis has the lowdown on /a>, including /a>.

A big part of the problem with the affiliate business model is when people offer fake rankings / ratings and only promote whoever pays them the most. The person/company which can afford to pay the most for leads often can only afford to because there is hidden risk or hidden cost in the service, or because they don’t deliver on their promises. An analogy here is those AAA rated mortgage backed securities where an S&P employee explained, “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.”

The biggest brands don’t pay as much per lead because they don’t have to. They invest in brand and quality of customer service. The best service-based companies don’t need to pay cut-rate ad prices to advertise. The best SEO companies have far more demand than time to service their customers.

I remember back in 2006 when one of the currently “top rated SEOs” did work for my wife’s website (before she met me). That SEO firm did nothing but outsource overseas irrelevant reciprocal link exchanges and her website *would not rank* for any semi-competitive keywords until *after* the reciprocal links page was removed from her site. After we took down those reciprocal links and built some quality links the site started to rank. We changed the FTP details as well because that guy’s services were not only not worth paying for…the reciprocal links were proved to be damaging, and we didn’t want him to put them back up. And in spite of not doing any services for months (and certainly no services worth paying for), this person wanted ensure they got paid for 12 months of service. And they didn’t want to let the contract end when it was supposed to either. They were all sales all the time.

What eventually stopped the credit card charges was when I wrote him via email “If her credit card is charged again we will be doing a reverse charge and a full writeup on the service.”

He responded to that with the following:

I would watch your comments and threats my friend as you have no idea of what I am capable of or who I am – this is a small industry and if you are trying to be a an up an coming player in it this is not the way to do it by bashing your competition. A simple email professionally stating that you were unhappy with the service would have sufficed and I would have looked into to make sure Giovanna got what she paid for.

I have run 2 optimization companies and have been in this business for 12 years now. With my contacts at Google and the other main engines I can get your ebook website banned within 1-2 days if this is how you do business – with threats and slander – keep it up.

The funny thing is all I said was that if he tried charging again (past the contract) that we would reverse charges. And yet the sleazeball told me to “watch your comments and threats” and that he could use “contacts at Google and other main engines” to get my website banned. What a jerk.

I have always had contempt for blowhards, and for pure hard-sales salesmen who put sales first and are willfully ignorant of their trade and/or who are willing to sell garbage product without any concern for the customer’s welfare.

I am grateful that the above mentioned person sucked at what they did & ripped people off back then. If they were not out scamming people and actually provided a useful service then my wife wouldn’t have had a reason to contact me and meet me and marry me.

I let it go for over 3 years, but if they are still scamming people then that needs to stop. I figure its only right that I write this post as a fair warning. All good things must come to an end. And so should bad things. Hopefully these clowns quite scamming people. Enough is enough.

Excerpt from:
/a>

We’re starting this Spring Break week off with a very rare guest post from em>TopRank Marketing client, Jiyan Wei. Jiyan is Director of Product Management at Vocus, Inc. where he drives product platform strategy and roadmap execution for PRWeb. I’ve presented on panels with Jiyan several times at search marketing conferences, talking about the virtues of search, social media and public relations, finding him to be a very strategic and smart marketer. We’ll be co-presenting at the upcoming em>MarketingPros B2B Forum in May on Content Optimization and Marketing.

In this post, Jiyan discusses the progression and importance of news content in blended search:

Once upon a time, Page 1 had a special meaning for PR practitioners and business owners alike.

It meant that for one day, they had received the pole position in the consciousness of the consumer, who would hopefully transition from newspaper consumer into business customer. For businesses – both local and global alike – Page 1 either meant an outpouring of business or pending doom.

With the emergence of search as ubiquitous, Page 1 has begun to take on added meaning. Business owners are still very concerned about Page 1 but now, depending on whom you ask, Page 1 often refers to search and the consequent generation of a limitless stream of business and leads without having to pay for ongoing PR or advertising.

For many, Page 1 in search has become the new holy grail of business owners and SEO practitioners alike.

When I’m asked the question, “Will PRWeb get us onto Page 1 of search,” I immediately start shaking my head vigorously while hoping no one from the major engines overheard the question.

Of course, nothing can guarantee you will be on Page 1 of search. That being said, as part of a broader online marketing strategy, news releases can be an effective tool to facilitate the outward expression of news and information about a business, which over time can result in the creation of online authority in the eyes of search engines.

Yet with blended search, the picture becomes muddled.

At some point in the last couple years, Google (and now Bing) decided that users want more than just Web results when they run a query in search and so started offering a front page that contained a broader array of types of content including images, video and news.

According to /a> news performs better in blended results than other forms of media and unlike other forms of media in blended search, news has a distinctly temporal slant. After all, news is really just information with a timestamp.

What this means for business owners, communicators, marketers, etc. is that under some circumstances, news can actually be a viable gateway onto Page 1 of search in a relatively short amount of time by leveraging sites that search engines regard as ‘news sites,’ including news release sites.

All that being said, here are some specific observations we’ve made about news in blended search:

1. If a recent news story is relevant to a query, it is more likely to appear somewhere in the results

This may seem fairly obvious but the devil is in the details. Nailing down ‘relevance’ between a query and results is a tall order but we have found that placing your target keywords in the title, preferably in the first part of the title of your news story, dramatically increase the likelihood that your news story will show up for queries of the target keywords once the crawlers have found the story. As the keywords descend into the story, from left-to-right and top-to-bottom, they become less impactful in terms of helping your story get onto the blended results for your target query.

2. News results can include thumbnailed images and these can improve click-through rates

Crawlers like Google look for relevant images to place in connection with news stories in the news block in blended search. They normally extract images from within the body of the story so including these images can result in having a thumbnail placed in connection with the result.

Who cares?

Well, everyone has seen the heat maps that show the importance of receiving top billing on page 1.

What we’ve found from our own internal tests however is that results with image thumbnails can have click-through rates that are similar and sometimes even higher than results that are actually located higher.

In other words, reader’s eyes are naturally drawn to the thumbnail so even if the news block is located lower down on the blended results page, the inclusion of a thumbnail can mitigate the lower placement to a great extent.

3. Many types of queries can result in news

There are some types of queries that seem to have an obvious time slant: current events, sports, celebrities, etc. However, we have seen news show up in blended search results for query types that seem less obviously tied to a date.

For example, tip sheets and best practice documents can be easily turned into news stories that can have a presence in blended search and drive traffic. With Spring right around the corner, there is a great opportunity to leverage audience demand for content to drive Web site traffic.

For example, a quick glance at Google insights reveals that queries for ‘Spring decorating’ are on the rise.

An opportunistic interior designer could use the opportunity to submit a release with a title like ‘Spring decorating tips from leading interior designer,’ that will have a good chance to tap into an upwards trending query in the blended search results.

4. Individual stories don’t appear in blended search results for long

Using your news to get Page 1 placement is a short-term proposition. As quickly as the story enters the blended search results, it can disappear. We typically see news stories show up in the blended search results for 24-48 hours. Depending on how dynamic the news landscape is for the query (some queries are going to receive a flood of news stories that may wash your story away in hours), the lifespan of your story may be even shorter.

Connect with Jiyan on /a>, /a> or visit PRWeb, TopRank’s favorite /a> service.