Blogging

How to process photos for the web

Laura — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 18:22:59 +0000

How to process photos for the web

How to process photos

Photographs of blank books by Laurel Tree Bindery

This guide on how to process photos is just the tip of the iceberg for photo editing and post-processing, but I hope it will give you a great foundation for processing your photos for posting online. We'll start with photographic file types and the critical difference between lossy and lossless. We'll examine best naming conventions and tips for organizing files. Finally we'll look at processing raw files and bulk processing files in Photoshop.

When you process photos for the web, it's good to keep multiple versions of your files. The highest resolution and best quality of your images is the original file. I like to think of that file like a negative and keep it safe and backed up. If your camera or phone shoots raw files, that’s always going to be the best option.

Handling and processing those original files can be challenging. Making files look good and load quickly is a critical balance to achieve. When uploading files to your website, the goal is high quality and fast speeds for users.

Lossy vs. Lossless

Images in GIF and JPEG formats are lossy, while TIFF, PNG, BMP and raw are lossless. What this means is that GIF and JPEG images are compressed by averaging the information. They become even more compressed each time you open and save them.

GIF and JPEG should only be final versions. When you need new files sizes or output, go back to your lossless original. If your original photos are in GIF or JPEG your first step should be to copy those files somewhere safe and never open the originals.

Naming conventions

Before we get into the steps to process photos, let’s talk about naming image files.

I'm picky, picky, picky about my naming conventions and you should be too for multiple reasons. First, the name stays with your file if it’s downloaded or shared. It’s also a claim of ownership. Finally, it is a ranking factor in SEO.

Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles. Wherever possible, make sure images are placed near relevant text and on pages that are relevant to the image subject matter.

Likewise, the filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image.

From: Google Images Best Practices

Because of this blog post, I’ve revisited my own naming conventions. Up until today, I named my files using a combination of snake and Pascal cases. Kebab case is the new best practice for the web.

EXAMPLE: I’ve gone from MessageInABottle_LaurelTreeBindery01.png to message-in-a-bottle-laurel-tree-bindery-01.png.

TLDR

camelCase
PascalCase
snake_case
kebab-case

Source

TIP: If you want to really optimize your SEO, consider having your keyword phrase in your image title and alt tags as well.

Process photos in bulk with Photoshop

Process RAW images into TIFF

Open your raw photos in Photoshop. The raw image file type is camera maker dependent. Here’s a list over on Wikipedia. I have a Nikon, so you’ll see that my files are nef. Personally, the Photoshop raw processor is the main place I edit.

This is the time to look at and adjust how your photo looks.

White balance
Exposure
Levels
Crop
Basic rotation or /horizon correction

Here's a guide to processing raw files from Adobe. If my file needs additional touch up, I open it and do non-destructive editing in Photoshop. Alternatively, GIMP has a raw plugin that makes it a good, open source, free substitute.

You can adjust each photo individually, or select multiple to make adjustments to an entire group.

When saving each raw photo, you get the option to change the name. Utilizing my new naming convention, I’ve set up the first part of the to be changed if needed, the second to be my company name, and let Photoshop add automatic numbering. I’m saving these as full sized, lossless TIFF files which will become my new working originals.

Organize folders for bulk processing

I move my TIFF files into their own folder.

Steps to bulk process photos.

I predominantly use bulk processing to save different sizes of my images and to add copyright information int he metadata.

Go to file menu -> Scripts - Image Processor

Choose size and file options

1. Navigate to the folder with the TIFF images.

2. In the second step I use "save in same location” and move them later.

3. In the third step choose your final file type and size:

The options I’ve chosen here: JPEG, Quality 12, Resize to 1080px wide. Height is large enough to be irrelevant. This will not stretch your photos.
TIFF is lossless and a good idea if this is still an interim stage.
Native PSD is really not recommended unless just for your own use.

4. This is where I add copyright information.

After you process your JPEGs will be in their own folder.

Photo processing results

Your final image size is really dependent on where the file is being uploaded. For example, for Laurel Tree Bindery I actually use a 1080 x 1080 square format. The website then creates and serves up smaller versions for different screen sizes.

I often do end up creating a couple different JPEG end sizes. I will always go back to the TIFFs to create new sizes to submit to shows or to upload to different platforms. I never, ever open and re-save a JPEG. A JPEG is always a final image.

Final thoughts

This is just a basic guide on processing and bulk re-sizing images with Photoshop. Let me know what questions you have or if there are any tips you would like to share.

Let's discuss: Slack, Facebook, or Twitter.

Laura Tue, 06/16/2020 - 11:22

Photography

Blogging

Photoshop

Adobe

Web content

Create content when it's convenient

Laura — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 17:30:27 +0000

Create content when it's convenient

Any basic article or guide on improving SEO will state that posting original content on a regular basis is a crucial part of any content delivery. As a small business owner and artist, I create content for two blogs and my time is precious.

I depend on scheduling posts so that when I have time to work on the blogs, I'm making content for the future. A great example of content that works well for this this is my Wednesday series on my art blog. I share a random page from one of my sketchbooks, so I can create these posts in bulk -- I spend hours scanning my sketchbooks and processing them to be web friendly. Then I take it one step further and create literally months of blog posts at a time.

Here on the monkey blog I can spend one work day scheduling my bi-weekly typography blogs for the rest of the month. In fact, I'm writing this post on Sunday night since I know I have a busy week ahead!

We use the Drupal scheduler module which offers the ability to choose a date and time for your post to be published. Drupal 7 users will find these controls down in the lower left vertical tabs when adding content.

For the non-Drupal users, I found these options that look like they extend Tumblr, Blogger, and Wordpress to have this functionality too.

So create content when it's convenient and let auto-publishing help you reach your publishing goals!

Laura Wed, 03/09/2016 - 09:30

Blogging

SEO

Drupal

Improve your headlines with this one weird trick

Laura — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 17:34:05 +0000

Improve your headlines with this one weird trick

CoSchedule has a cool headline analyzer tool for content creators. This blog post was originally called "Creating Powerful Headlines" which receives an whopping 33%. Disappointing and clearly I should be able to do better.

The tool further breaks down the score into four categories:

"A tool for creating powerful headlines" got a 64%. The website calls this a B+, but that's a low C anywhere I have ever been graded. Better, but I'm still not satisfied so I'll try again!

My best score is a 73% "Improve your headlines with this one weird trick". Come. On. Now. That kind of clickbait is so obvious.

Even worse, that's the best I could come up with; I feel like a failure. C'est la vie.

I tried!

Laura Wed, 09/02/2015 - 10:34

Blogging

Blogging Best Practices

Laura — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:47:31 +0000

Blogging Best Practices

Who

The first question to consider is who is your audience. For me it's our clients and fellow designers. We also have content geared more towards programmers and crypto currency enthusiasts. This means every article isn't written for every user, so we use tagging functionality to keep related content together.

What

My personal blog is where I share works in progress, glimpses into my artistic process, and work by others that I am inspired by. This blog reflects our company, our vision, and our love of sharing knowledge.

When

It's better to post once weekly than to post 5 things at once and then nothing for a month. Currently here and on my art site, I'm blogging for every weekday for 30 days and Dave's helping. This blog post was inspired by an email I wrote to one of our clients this morning.

A standard feature we use for our client blogs is Scheduler. There is a "scheduler" tab in the lower left tabs of our Drupal forms that gives authors the ability to schedule blog posts. I love that a post can go live when when I don't even have time to be at the computer. This is especially handy for content that isn't time sensitive and also helps me to think in terms of ongoing, related content.

On this blog, I often pre-write the Typography Tuesday and Type on Thursday posts and use scheduler liberally for them. Friday is dedicated to Robot Sex Nickel updates and market recaps so those need to be written on Fridays due to their time sensitive content. We sort our content with tagging functionality that gives us the ability to create nice listing pages and tags Google+ pages.

Where

Share everywhere, share often! I recommend setting up your blog to auto-update your social media accounts. I use If This Than That to keep my networks current and have posted how to do that here.

Why

A blog drives traffic to your business. Your content shows potential clients your areas of expertise and helps with search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines give preference to sites that have regular updates. Google Trends is an excellent tool that suggest words to help with SEO.

How

Image: Please include an image! I made this list of sites that have photos that are free to use and free of copyright! Some need attribution in the form of the photographers name or a link to their site, but most do not. This image is from Death to the Stock Photo although they do not require attribution.

If your content management system has the option, go ahead and use the same image as the teaser and in the main body. In Drupal, we use these images to make listing pages and social networks often use the teaser image.

Summary: Since CMS varies, if you have a summary field, use it. In Drupal, this is immediately above the main text body and extremely helpful for designing the listing page. Like the teaser image, the summary can show up in search results and social network posts.

Abstract: Use abstract meta tags if your CMS has them. In Drupal, this is one of the vertical tabs in the bottom left corner. It should be 150 characters in sentence format and include hot search terms within a concise article description. In addition to helping with SEO, it can be used to customize search results. My dynamic home page was only showing the copyright line as the description and I used meta tags to dictate what the search engines would display. When writing abstracts, consider using Google Trends to help pick words that are searched for often.

Have fun and happy blogging!

Laura Mon, 10/13/2014 - 14:47

Free Photography Sites

Laura — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 04:43:32 +0000

Free Photography Sites

Who needs photographs? Everybody! OK, well maybe not everybody, but if you create content, a photograph truly can be worth 1,000 words. If you're a blogger, images can break apart your text and add graphic interest to your site. If you're a designer, photos help you satisfy clients who don't have visual content. If you're an artist, many of these sites offer images that can be remixed into new works. This list is compiled from a wide variety of sources and it is up to date as of today. I decided to search for the word monkey on each site and choose my my favorite from the first page of results. If there were no results I choose a recent image. I provided photographer attribution when available, even though most of these sites do not require it.

Search Creative Commons is my go to place to start which is why it's first, but rest of this list is in alphabetical order.

Search Creative Commons

This is a portal that allows you to customize your search for vector graphics, audio files, and photographs. I especially love that you can search for things to alter and remix!

1 Million Free Pictures

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. This is a personal project by Toper Domingo to create and share one million of his photos for free.

Photo by Toper Domingo

The British Library

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

Anvar-i Suhayli, a version of the Kalila va Dimna fables. - caption: 'The monkeys outwitting the bears.'

Compfight

No Login. Attribution Required. Even when searching the Creative Commons link, I only find attribution needed images. They provide html that I simply pasted below the photo here.

Photo Credit: fabiogis50 via Compfight cc

Death to the Stock Photo

Receive via email newsletter. No attribution. Instead of a searchable online site, Death to the Stock Photo emails a link to a downloadable photo set once a month.

This image is from the September's pack "Not Stock".

Dotspin

Login required. Only free for personal use. Commercial license available.

Foodie's Feed

Like on Facebook to download. No attribution. As the name says, this site is dedicated to food photography by Jakub Kapusnak. I had to like them on Facebook to download the Farmer's Market pack. Unfortunately it's a .rar file so I can't open it on my Mac. I've reached out to Jakub to see if he offers .zip files as well. I'll update this page if I hear differently.

Free Images

Email verified sign up requiring detailed contact info. Attribution variable. I had to sign up and provide complete personal information to download an image. The contact form didn't work because it wanted a security code that I couldn't see, so I chose a photographer that didn't need to be notified.

A little monkey from Brazil by Davi Camarinha

Free Range

Instant sign up. No attribution. I had to sign up for this site to download, but they only needed a user name and password and I was good to go.

Baboon by Chance Agrella

Function

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Function offers free photography by Liam McKay.

Photo by Liam McKay

Getrefe

Shopping Cart. No login. No attribution. "Natural looking photos of people interacting with technology." Had to provide name and email to purchase photo fro $0 and then download image from emailed link.

Photo by Tomas Laurinavicius

GratisPhotography

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Free high resolution photographs by Ryan McGuire.

Photo by Ryan McGuire

IM Free

No login. Requires attribution. "A curated collection of free resources, all for commercial use."

Gibbon by Tom Tolkien

Jay Mantri

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Photographs by Jay Mantri.

Photos by Jay Mantri.

Little Visuals

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Weekly photo collections.

Doorbell from Week 13 Collection.

Magdeleine

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Daily photographs by Kamil Lehmann.

Photo by Kamil Lehmann.

New Old Stock

No login. No attribution. Public domain works. I only got one result, but it's pretty brilliant!

Hey Monkey

PDPics

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

Monkey Looking Up by Sachin Patekar

PicJumbo

No login. No attribution required, but appreciated. No restrictions. PicJumbo showcases free images by Viktor Hanacek.

The Sky Full of Clouds by Viktor Hanacek

PickUp Image

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

Monkey Tamarin Pinc -Saguinus oedipus by Jurassic

Picography

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. Photography provided by Hidden Depth.

Lucky Path by Mick Maguire

Pixabay

No login. No attribution. No restrictions.

Vervet by Sonel

Public Domain Archive

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

Wood Door Black and White Lines by Matt Hobbs

Public Domain Pictures

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

Monkey Gaze by Lilla Frerichs

Raumrot

No login. Requires attribution.

Display Dummy by Marcus Spiske

Split Shire

No login. No attribution required, but appreciated. No restrictions. Photographs by Daniel Nanescu.

Starry Night by Daniel Nanescu

Superfamous

No login. Requires attribution. Photographs by Folkert Gorter.

Photo by Folkert Gorter

Unsplash

No login. No attribution. No restrictions. 10 free photos every 10 days.

Photo by Paula Vermeulen

Viintage

No login. No attribution. Public domain works.

“Curious and uncommon performance of a monkey.” Scan of 2D image in the public domain believed to be free to use without restriction in the US.

Wellcome Images

No login. Requires attribution. The historical images are all available under these terms.

Advertisement for 'Brooke's Soap'.

Laura Wed, 09/24/2014 - 21:43

Blogging

Design

Photography

A Single Word Changes Everything

Laura — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 20:22:23 +0000

A Single Word Changes Everything

I have bookmarked this great article about choosing your words carefully mainly because of the awesome lists of words and when to use them. I believe in the power of words and using meanings and connotations to evoke a mode or feeling. Since I spend many hours each week writing I really like having a resource like this for when I'm struggling for the correct whatchamacallits!

The old brain is the part that controls decisions, and it also happens to be the most primitive. In this way, the words you use to market to the old brain will often be the most direct, simple, arresting, visual words you have. You’ll likely see a lot of these “old brain” words in the lists below. The ultimate list of words and phrases that convert.

Here's a taste of what you'll find at the link!

The 5 most persuasive words in the English language

Use them for: Calls-to-action, headlines, email subject lines, headings, opening sentences and paragraphs

You
Free
Because
Instantly
New

Click through to the article to see the rest of these great lists all in one place!

The 20 most influential words to use in: headlines, bullet points, subject lines
3 words to encourage community for: email signups, trial offers, in-app messaging
10 cause-and-effect words and phrases for: closing paragraphs, transitions
12 phrases that imply exclusivity to use on: signup forms, links, calls-to-action, subheads
9 phrases that imply scarcity for: headings, promo copy
28 words and phrases that make you feel safe for: payment forms, signup forms, testimonials
48 ubiquitous power words for: email subject lines, headlines, calls-to-action
9 word for shareable content for: social media updates

Laura Wed, 09/03/2014 - 13:22

Blogging

Writting

Marketing

Maximixe SEO with Google Trends

Laura — Thu, 22 May 2014 00:28:35 +0000

Maximixe SEO with Google Trends

Google trends offers a glimpse into what the world is searching for and talking about right now. One of my clients complained that it was another hoop to jump through, but I see it more like a playbook to the game of Google search results. With a few minutes of your time, you can see if your writing includes potential words or phrases that clients might be using to find your web site. This will help organic SEO results and pay per click advertising.

Hot Searches

Hot Searches is Google's snapshot of what people are currently searching. If current events are relevant to your business and non-controversial, piggyback on that popularity. This is called newsjacking. Just remember to stay away from hot topic issues or you'll find yourself on a list like this.

Explore

To me, this area is the more powerful tool. Here you can figure out what words and phrases your customers and readers are actually typing. Use it when writing and editing content, especially in meta tag abstracts, to find the most search friendly terms.

Starting at the top, customize your search terms based on location, time frame, categories, and type of search. For this example, I started with the defaults.

Interest over time

The first section simply shows a search term and the interest across a ten year span. Let's look at a search I did recently for a catering client that does a lot of work during the winter holiday season. I started with the client preferred phrase, "holiday party" and got these results.

As you can see, the chart unsurprisingly peaks near the end of each year and happens annually.

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don't have enough data, 0 is shown.

What was surprising to us, is that the phrase "Christmas party" is a much more popular search term.

The client didn't want to be that specific because the audience in the Bay Area is multi-cultural and most companies don't throw a "Christmas party".

Regional interest

In addition to showing users preference to a phrase over time, this section offers global insight into search terms. This is especially relevant to ensure you're using the phrases that appeal to your audience. Here we see that when you look by city the phrase "Christmas party"…

… is not what San Francisco prefers, instead it is "holiday party".

Forecasts

Well of course, not really. They collect and organize data - personal, web traffic, web site content - so it's worth a look. All terms don't have forecasts, but the goal is:

To predict the popularity of a term in the future, Trends looks at how many people searched for that term in the past. Trends doesn’t take into account the context of the search term or its category.

The forecast function is a checkbox in the upper right hand corner of the Interest Over Time section. Obviously, with an example like we've been using, Google can accurately predict that these phrases will go up again near the end of the year. I'm pretty sure we all saw that coming. Trends and causal relationships aren't always obvious and so I utilize this powerful tool to see 10+ years of compiled data at my finger tips.

Google has an excellent help section here if you want more in depth information.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team.

Laura Wed, 05/21/2014 - 17:28

Blogging

SEO

Google

What, When & How to Engage on Social Media

Laura — Wed, 14 May 2014 21:56:41 +0000

What, When & How to Engage on Social Media

Our blog posts are automatically shared on our networks. That means we're sharing original content at a maximum of one per weekday which fits within The Social Media Guide's frequency. This looks to be ideal for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus, but completely ineffective on Twitter. Below are my summaries of what I've been researching, as well as links to the original articles. Buffer is a free tool that I deliberately left out of last week's guide to pushing content to social networks. So after using Buffer for a few months, I found the free plans limit of 10 scheduled tweets to be limiting. That's only half a week . I discovered that Hoot Suite allows for tweet scheduling and has no limit! Although I'm not using it for scheduling tweets, I recommend subscribing to Buffer's blog for informative, well written, and inspiring articles.

What

Small Business Marketing Tools has this excellent chart examining what type of content works best on different social networks.

The takeaway is Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are best for sharing news, content, and stories while LinkedIn is best for sharing industry news and discussions. It seems pretty straightforward, but knowing your audience is half the battle.

How Long

The ideal length for content depends on a wide variety of factors. The Ideal Length of Everything According to Science gets into the statistics of engagement. Their results:

Tweet: 100 characters
Facebook post: less than 40 characters
Google+ headline: less than 60 characters
Headlines: 6 words
Blog posts: 1,600 words
Width of a paragraph: 40-55 characters
Email subject line: 28-39 characters
Title tag: 55 characters

When

The Social Media Frequency Guide really gets into the details of posting across social network platforms. The main takeaway is:

Post to Twitter at least 5 times a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be better off.

Post to Facebook/Google+ 5 to 10 times per week.

Post to LinkedIn once per weekday.

I highly recommend clicking through and reading the entire article as it's insightful and well researched. In addition to frequency, time of day can make a huge difference. For example, this article discusses 4 ways to find the best time to tweet.

Another excellent read on this topic is The Case for Reposting Content with three great results.

More traffic
Hit multiple time zones
Reach your new followers

It also goes over tips on how to implement and test the success with your own content.

It looks like I'll be spending significant time with Buffer and scheduling posts over the next few weeks. I'll report back if I discover any more great insights!

Next week we'll look at optimizing your content for SEO by using Google Trends.

This post was updated to include information about Hoot Suite January 22, 2015.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team.

If you need help creating your social media strategy, contact us today.

Laura Wed, 05/14/2014 - 14:56

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

Laura — Wed, 07 May 2014 15:29:21 +0000

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

For my art site, I believe in having a social media presence on multiple platforms. I also prefer to focus my time creating content for my own site and then share it from there. And of course, I want my content to look good. Currently I have fan pages set up on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and I also push my new content to my LinkedIn profile. Below are the tools I'm currently using.

All of this is done using the RSS feed. CMS driven platforms such as WordPress, Bloggr, or Tumblr should create a raw RSS feed automatically, although it probably won't look very nice. Feedburner can clean it up for you.

Feedburner can easily theme your RSS (Rich Site Summary) driven content and offers integration to popular readers. Feedburner also supports publishing your feed to Twitter. Here's what my Drupal RSS looks like before Feedburner…

…and after.

Definitely an improvement! To see what your raw RSS feed looks like navigate to YourSiteName.com/rss.xml.

HootSuite allows you to view and interact with multiple social networks. Their free plan includes integrating up to 5 networks allowing you to publish content to all of them at once. There is also the capacity for scheduled posts, location tagging, and integrated privacy settings.

I primarily use HootSuite to push my content to my Google+ page. I've tried a few different combinations of services and feeds and have found that using the Feedburner RSS feed with HootSuite looks best on Google+. This is controlled in the RSS/Atom section of HootSuite's settings. Here is a comparison of the IFTTT recipe vs. the HootSuite post.

Since my site is primarily images, I definitely prefer HootSuite on the left.

GPlus allows you to have a slightly nicer Google+ name. Basically a URL shortener, the name defaults to the long numerical Google generated name once it loads. Google+ is inviting page owners and individuals to change this, making this service obsolete.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a powerful service that allows you to automate almost anything. Helpful lifestyle updates such as receiving a text when you need to pack an umbrella or an email when tomorrow's forecast calls for snow are handy recipes that you can use. There are powerful back up tools that allow automatic back ups of photos posted to Flickr or Instagram to your preferred cloud service. For social network integration, I'm using these straight forward recipes designed by others to publish my RSS driven content. You can create triggers based on keywords in your content and more. These are the recipes I'm using now.

RSS to LinkedIn profile
RSS to Tumblr
RSS to Twitter (currently I'm using the Drupal module)
RSS to Facebook Fan Page
As I mentioned above, RSS to Google+ was not very pretty, so I'm using HootSuite for this push.

Log in to all of your social networks before signing up for HootSuite and IFTTT to make the integrations a little easier, and make sure you copy your RSS feed into each recipe. Also when you change passwords, it's a good practice to double check that your networks are still linked.

Drupal is king for content management, but the social network integration is better suited to pulling, sharing, and commenting. Twitter is the exception and is one of the easiest to integrate and gives specific control over individual posts. I followed these instructions.

Drupal Modules

Twitter
Oauth
Create your custom Twitter App

I find this to be the best and most direct social integration and I look forward to when other social networks are as smooth. The Twitter publishing shows up as one of the bottom vertical tabs when creating content and the content published can be customized globally through the content type edit page. Authors with the proper permissions can add custom hashtags and intros for any content.

If you don't have this level of access to your site or lack the expertise, Feedburner and IFTTT are excellent options for simple Twitter integration.

Next week's post will cover what content goes best with different social platforms, how long the ideal post should be, and what the best frequency is to reach out to your networks. Stay tuned.

This post edited by the Revise It! Team

Laura Wed, 05/07/2014 - 08:29

Meta tags and SEO

Laura — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 15:23:38 +0000

Meta tags and SEO

Meta tags are a handy tool that have been abused and misunderstood.

Meta tags started as a simple text way to designate search terms on your website. Often just lists of keywords, they were abused by websites that would put a lot of junk tags in their pages in order to improve their rankings. Search engines got smarter and meta tags have evolved.

Sunday

It all began one Sunday evening when a client asked where Google gets the summary text that shows up under a listing. Curious, I googled my name to find out what my personal portfolio site looks like in search engines. I was dismayed to say the least. As you can see Ask and AOL match Google and they are showing the most recent update on my home page -- usually the first line of a blog post. Not ideal for a main site description. Bing and Yahoo are both showing the text from my footer.

Because my name is uncommon, searching by that yields excellent results with first spots across all the browsers I tested. That makes it easy to focus on customizing these search results.

Google Original Search Results

Bing Original Search Results

Ask Original Search Results

AOL Original Search Results

Yahoo Original Search Results

Monday

The next day determined to make my search results more relevant, we installed the Drupal Metatag module. Since search engines igmore keywords, I used the abstract fields. I began by putting a description in for the front page. Next I turned to the list pages that make up the gallery sections, blog list page, and shop page. Each of those received newly designed headings and descriptions.

Tuesday

Today was spent updating the Shows section on my website. It has been neglected and will take hours to get it up to date. I'll do a little each day while I wait for my front page results to show up in the search engines!

Wednesday

Dave led me to expect my updated results to take a while, but I'm impatient and have been checking daily (I know, twice). Today I looked and my site description has been updated at Google! A couple of hours of installation, configuring, and writing; two days of waiting and voíla a much better looking search result! As before Ask and AOL are also showing my meta tag description. Bing and Yahoo are unfortunately still showing the text from my footer.

Google Success on Wednesday!

AOL Success on Wednesday!

Ask Success on Wednesday!

Thursday

Bing and Yahoo are still showing my footer text.

Friday

Sadly, no change. Dave is confident that Bing and Yahoo will catch up and that Google simply scans with greater frequency.

Saturday

Ooops. I forgot to check!

Sunday

Bing and Yahoo are also now showing my updated site description! Success!

Yahoo Success on Sunday!

Bing Success on Sunday!

The meta tag module seamlessly integrates with Drupal nodes allowing you to customize abstracts on any type of content: blog, static pages, listing pages, etc.. The abstract field of the meta tag adds relevance and customizes the look to your search results.

Laura Tue, 12/03/2013 - 07:23

Blogging

How to process photos for the web

How to process photos

Lossy vs. Lossless

Naming conventions

TLDR

Process photos in bulk with Photoshop

Organize folders for bulk processing

Steps to bulk process photos.

Choose size and file options

Photo processing results

Final thoughts

Create content when it's convenient

Improve your headlines with this one weird trick

Blogging Best Practices

Who

What

When

Where

Why

How

Free Photography Sites

A Single Word Changes Everything

The 5 most persuasive words in the English language

Maximixe SEO with Google Trends

Hot Searches

Explore

Interest over time

Regional interest

Related Searches

Forecasts

What, When & How to Engage on Social Media

What

How Long

When

Pushing Blog Content to Social Networks

Meta tags and SEO