Google Photos Blog

google photos blog Google Photos Blog pictures

Google is everywhere today, so it comes as no surprise that they have a photo blog…The Official Google Photos Blognews, tips and tricks from the Picasa team at Google.

For those not familiar with Picasa, it’s a great tool to organize and edit your photos, which enables you to upload and share them using Picasa Web Albums. Just like other Google applications, the interface is clean, intuitive, responsive and easy to use.

So, if you love photography and are new to Picasa, Google Photos Blog is a great way to learn how use Picasa to get the most out of your photo archives!

Google Fast Flip Rocks

Which marketing campaigns work best? How do you quantify their success? What indicators should you track? Packed with techniques and insider secrets not documented elsewhere, Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics has the expert guidance you need to enhance your brand and increase your site’s ROI.

google fast flip snapshot 1024x472 Google Fast Flip Rocks picturesGoogle Fast Flip, an experimental news hub which allows user to view dozens of publishers and read the content, rocks! While doing my normal survey of the world this morning, I read about the controversy surrounding the new Google offering. I’m not going to launch into any legal or ethics debate on this topic, but only want to say this searchable /filterable media tool is awesome. I really love looking at the popular cover photography for the day.

Top Links of the Week

Here are some of the more interesting posts I stumbled across this week…which may or may not be useful with your photography blog. In any case, I was kind enough to share……some of these links are not fresh off the press, but are fairly new to me…enjoy!

download alexa top 1,000,000 website for free

60 most wanted photoshop tutorials, brushes, .psds and resources

25 ways to spiceup blog post photos

21 ways to make yourblog or website sticky

increase your pagerank | tysblog.com

get organized

10 amazing website designs for photographers and designers

Social poster

35 basic tutorials to get you started with Photoshop

crowdspring

cssaddict

30+ tools for the amateur writer

How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo

Learn to develop a high ranking website and dramatically grow your Internet traffic. While I admit to reading every blog possible on SEO, I’d like to reveal how I was able to get on the front page of Google and Yahoo in a short period of time.

SEO doesn’t happen overnight. If you think the following information will get you a top ranking in less than 7 days, you can stop reading now. SEO and growing your search engine rankings doesn’t happen over night. However, there are methods you can use to dramatically cut down on the time it takes to get your site noticed.

Defining your target audience. When I first started this blog, my main interest was creating quality content on photo blogs and photography so I could grow an audience of repeat visitors. While I understood that linked to top rated blogs helps greatly for SEO tactics, I also knew from experience that there are many great blogs were lower rating created by people very passionate about photo blogs. By reaching out to this community, I hoped together, we could spread the word about this site. So this is the market I targeted…passionate photographers, regardless of rank, who loved talking about their work and sharing it with others.

Defining your target keywords. We all read a lot about keywords. Without going too far down this dry topic, defining your target keywords is one of the most important things you will need to do to expect any results! What are keywords? Simply put, these are the words your potential audience uses to search topics related to any subject matter. In my case, some of my selected keywords include photo blog reviews, photo blog review, awesome photography blogs, and photography blogs. Listed below are snapshots of just a few of the search engine results I currently experience:

awesome photography blogs google search4 197x300 How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo picturesphoto blog reviews google search2 217x300 How I Got on the Front Page of Google and Yahoo picturesThere are many more examples I could provide, but you get the idea. Spending the time to focus on YOUR specific keywords can help tremendously in driving traffic to your site. Linking to other sites or stories is very useful, but search engine traffic is key.

You must ask yourself, what keywords or keyword phrases best define my niche? …and then write them down and start to research how competitive each of your entries are in the marketplace. I admit to being a spreadsheet junkie, but also had a hard time keeping up with all the data. I hated to throw up my hands and acknowledge I needed help…but this is exactly the point which changed my success.

Professional SEO help is very affordable. Over the course of the past few years, I had used several free programs, enjoyed a little success, but hated dealing with trial offers and a limited array of features. As a programmer and web developer, I wanted to think I could create something on my own to keep from spending any money on blogging. This stubbornness held me back for longer than I would like to admit. I finally broke down and realized that I was wasting valuable time on tasks others have already figured out.  Why reinvent the wheel? For less than the cost a SEO would charge for one hour of time, I was able to purchase a full feature SEO program. Looking back (which I hate to do), I wish I had spent the $47 for this program, long before I purchased the stacks of book while looking for the silver bullet to SEO gains.

Conclusion. I love the product, and yet, have only been using it for 5 months on this site. The results speak for themselves. While my results have not reached the levels obtained by others using this program, I understand my niche and can easily state this is the best and only investment I’ve made for blogging SEO software. As stated previously, my rankings did not pop overnight….in my case, it took roughly 2 months to see real results. If you are trully interested in monetizing your site, focus on getting traffic first. The program is a great step in that direction!

Google starts new “LIFE”

digitized life photo archive 300x216 Google starts new LIFE picturesGoogle recently unveiled the newly digitized LIFE photo archive. Viewers now have the ability to search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google. Looks like I’ve found a great new place to spend my free time…Thanks Google!…Get all the top Technology articles FREE for a year. Click Here

life photo archive hosted by google2 300x226 Google starts new LIFE pictures

Don’t publish another post until you read this!

Great traffic on photography blogs does not happen by accident..or does it? Clearly, to be successful photo bloggers, visitors are important. What I am about to show you will forever change the way you manage your blog, so don’t publish another post until you read this.

It is no secret that Google is not just an important player in today’s online world, it is the most important factor in determining your online success. Google’s US search market dominance hits an all-time high this year with 67% of searches performed, with Yahoo Search (20%), MSN (5.25%), and Ask.com (4%), far behind.

But what does Google’s success have to do with photography blogs? Patience, I getting there. Google’s dominance in the search engine market has enabled them to compile more data than you could possibly imagine. But lucky for us, Google is the sharing type. Most users of Google have probably never noticed all the valuable applications they simply give away. From maps to office applications, widgets to data trends…yes, internet search data trends. By navigating your way around that minimalistic browser, you will find Google trends to map your way to blogging success.

Before I go too far, let me lay down the breadcrumbs to locate Google Trends…Google>more>even more>Labs>Google Trends. It’s amazing that most of the links you will find on these pages were once small companies which were bought out for millions, and are now just a blip in the world of Google!

Ok. Now that we’re warmed up it’s time to get down to business. Before you start any business or in our case write a post, you should start by defining your target audience. The target audience will be the customers or viewers you plan to pitch your product/post to. Make sense? Good. As we lay out our plans to define an audience, we start by thinking in broad terms. For our example, we will pursue field of photography. And since you are reading this article on my site, we can refine our product to “photography blogs”.

google trends Dont publish another post until you read this! picturesNow, you will need to pull up the Google Trends page which recently discussed. What is Google Trends? “With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.”

From the description about Google Trends, I have emphasized, in bold letters, the key reason to use this tool is to increase the exposure and traffic of your photography blog….”in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.” Just a few paragraphs ago, we talked refining our product, or in our example blog post to “photography blogs”. With the use of this tool, we can determine what parts of the world the most searches for our topic occur, and then redefine our topic even more. After we enter our phrase into the tool and enter, here is the data we are presented with.

photography blog trends1 Dont publish another post until you read this! picturesWe can see quickly see that “photography blogs” is an increasingly popular keyword phrase. This is a good start, but there is much more we have also learned. In addition, Google makes it easy for us to drill down to the locale of users searching for our phrase. In the case, we can quickly see that
web searchers from India are the number one searchers for “photography blogs”. This is valuable information as we try to define our product/customer relationship equation. In using this data, it is clear that we can greatly increase our potential viewing audience by incorporating Indian related content, in addition to our photography blog subject matter. Although you don’t have to focus on the largest searching audience of your blog post topic, it would be wise to select one of the top audiences or change your subject matter to suit the audience you are after.

As we continue to sort through the search data on our keyword phrase “photography blogs”, we see thatregional photography blog trends Dont publish another post until you read this! pictures Google also gives us the “city” where the top searches of our phrase are performed. In this example, we see that ” New York City”, “San Francisco”, and “Washington, D.C.” are tops on the list. Again, we will greatly increase our viewing audience combining our general topic “photography blogs”, with content related to one or more of the top cities.

Using Google Trends will allow you to simultaneously compare up to 5 keywords/keyword phrases on one graph. Besides viewing where your search is coming from, I like to use Google Trends to determine if there is a seasonal nature to what I am writing about as well.

city photography blog trends Dont publish another post until you read this! picturesGoogle Trends really is a wonderful tool that can boost your traffic and drive results for free. Yes, the most under-appreciated blogging tool is free for the taking…if you know where to find it. So give it a test drive and let me know what you think!

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Google Chrome Starts Off With a Bang

google chrome browser Google Chrome Starts Off With a Bang picturesInspired by a recent post I read over at Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection on the popularity of Google Chrome browser, I decided to investigate my own Analytics data. Over the past 4 days, Google Chrome users make up 6.96% of my visitors! That is quite a reception for a new browser, but after all, this is Google we are talking about….In talking with several web publishers, Chrome seems to be exceedingly popular. Most of my friends run photography sites and I believe the minimalistic styling of Chrome goes well with graphic arts and photography, which may be why we’ve seen the high numbers. But you be the judge…If you’ve been lost at sea and haven’t been able to download the new browser, download Chrome here. I have included a snapshot of one of my favorite sites, YCombinator, to give a visual to this dry text.

What do you think of Google Chrome? I love to hear from you!Technorati Tags: , , photography on google, chrome users,

 Google Chrome Starts Off With a Bang pictures