Month: April 2012

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Local Search Directories offering free listings

Gone are the days when people would use the trusty old “yellow pages” to search for services they require. Now the first port of call is the internet and many times will turn to an online local directory such as Yelp.

Does your business have a local search presence? Getting listed in local online directories can help the overall ranking of your site and give you more opportunities to connect with potential customers.

There has been a real growth in local directories over the last couple of years and generally getting listed in them is easy…although quite time consuming.

Here is a list of 43 directories that offer FREE listings.

  1. Google ( view our Google local directory listing)
  2. Bing ( View our Bing local listing)
  3. Yahoo ( view our Yahoo Local listing)
  4. Yelp ( view our Yelp profile)
  5. Merchant Circle ( View our Merchant Circle listing)
  6. Linkedin ( view Indigo Image profile)
  7. Yellow Pages ( yp lisiting)
  8. White Pages (local lisiting)
  9. Local Pages( listing)
  10. SuperMedia (listing)
  11. Mapquest ( view listing)
  12. Local ( view our Local Listing)
  13. Think Local (listing)
  14. City Slick ( view our listing)
  15. Show me Local ( listing)
  16. Insider Pages ( Chicago web designer listing)
  17. Manta(Manta Listing)
  18. Volta.com (Indigo Image Volta Listing)
  19. Zip.pro (our profile)
  20. Twibs (listing)
  21. Localeze (listing)
  22. Localdatabase (Chicago web design company listing)
  23. Yellowwise (listing)
  24. MojoPages ( listing)
  25. Tulapo (Indigo Image profile)
  26. Best of the Web (profile)
  27. Yellowbot(Listing)
  28. Yellowee (listing)
  29. City Squares (listing)
  30. Kudzu (listing)
  31. Brownbook (chicago web design profile)
  32. Match Point (listing)
  33. Hot Frog (listing)
  34. Zoom Info (listing)
  35. Magic Yellow (listing)
  36. UScity
  37. Yellowbook
  38. City Search
  39. Yellowassistance
  40. Localdex (Indigo Image-Chicago web designer listing)
  41. Business Journal
  42. US yellow Pages
  43. City Search

If you are looking to increase the visibility of your business in local search give us a call to see how we can help: 847-607-8679

© 2012 Chicago Web Designer

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Tips for Making your blog images more search engine friendly.

If you have just started blogging, or even been blogging for a while here are a few tips that will make your images more friendly to both the search engines and your site visitors.

Before you upload: Optimize your image

  • Scale
    Scale your photographs to the exact dimensions which you wish to use them, don’t rely on your blog to re-size your  photos, they will download much faster if they are scaled pre upload.
  • File size vs quality
    Ideally your photographs need to be small in file size but in great quality, large files can take a long time to download frustrating your readers and driving them away.
  • How?
  • Most image editing software will allow you to easily optimize you images to be web ready, however if you don’t have access to anything suitable try Pic Monkey . It will allow you to crop re-size and add text and graphic overlays

Rename your images
Most camera will name photographs some like D03456, an arbitrary number that means nothing. Re-name your photographs so they encompass the following.

  1. The content of the photograph
  2. The content of your blog post
  3. A phrase that someone may search

e.g You are about to write a blog post all about how to make some rope pencil pots.

The image below is named rope_pencil_pots.jpg, which reflects the composition of the photo, the content of the blog post and could feasibly be a phase that someone would use as a search query.  Each word with an under score _, but is perfectly OK to separate with a hyphen instead (rope-pencil-pots.jpg)

rope Pencil Pots

Why?

When search engines visit you site they are unable to “see” a  photo of a rope pencil pot, all they understand is the code (HTML) powering the site which in this case looks like this.


<img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_lBtkHUaGZQ/TxhQ30_6TJI/AAAAAAAAA78/YYvdehrboig/s320/rope_pencil_pots.jpg" width="320" />

By giving the photo a meaningful file name it essentially helps the search engines ” see” the photo.

You have uploaded your photo now what?

Add an ALT tag to your photo

What is an Alt Tag?

Alt stands for “Alternative text”  and adding an alt tag to an image further enhances the ability of the search engine to understand the content of the photo.

In the case of my rope pots my alt tag would be

alt=”rope pencil pots”

As you can see the phase I am using is the same as the name I gave the image file.

How To Add an ALT Tag

The ease in which an alt tag can be added to a photo depends on which blogging platform you are using, WordPress is much easier than Blogger.

And because this is difficult to explain in words I have made a video which covers adding an Alt tag to your images in both Blogger and WordPress (and just in case you are wondering the accent is English!)

Is it worth the effort?

And here is a little test to show you this effort does pay off. Click the link below, it is the Google image search for Rope Pencil Pots …now look at what they have listed as the first image!

Google Search for Rope Pencil Pots
And just in case you are interested in making some rope pencil pots for yourself check out a tutorial over at Creative in Chicago

©2012 Chicago Web Designer

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New WordPress websites for Life Celebrant Ruth Hasser

Launched today are two new wordpress powered website for celebrant Ruth Hasser.

Ruth has two sides to her business, weddings and funerals, or life tributes. As you can imagine the target audience for each is very different.

A first generation site, designed and developed in  2009 for her wedding business,  served her well and really helped grow her client base as a lead generation tool.

“Last year at this time, pre-website, I had one wedding scheduled for 2009. By the end of the year I had done 25. Right now, I already have 17 weddings scheduled, and I have been receiving an average of one lead per day since the beginning of January- outstanding!”

But like all tools they need to be refined to offer maximum effectiveness, so this second generation site offers social media integration allowing her clients to connect with her via Facebook and YouTube and we took the opportunity to move the site to the more robust blogging platform WordPress.  This has the added advantage that Ruth now has full editorial control of the content of the the site. Ruth was happy with the look and feel of the first generation site so we kept the design the same but did increase the width to accommodate the most common  screen resolution.

wedding celebrant web site

A website dedicated to the funeral side of her business is a new endeavor. We kept the brand image the same as the wedding site but used different imagery and a more muted color palette.

life celebrant web site

Switching from Blogger to WordPress can be a little daunting for a client and there is definitely a learning curve. As well as training we also provided Ruth with a set of screen cast videos which outline how to do the most common updates such as publishing a new blog post and uploading photographs.

© 2012 Chicago Web Designer