Sean Ragsdale Teeing off the 12th Hole at the Vail Golf Course – Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals

When users search Google, they have options. Usually, people search through the “Everything” tab. However, users are tending to search through the “Images” tab. For this reason we need to have SEO for images. This is really important for our SEO.

(For Bloggers) When blogging, we are NEVER TO USE other images, because we are not helping ourselves AT ALL. If you are looking for a photo and resort to Google, I will find you, and it will NOT BE GOOD.

Added Value Proposition:
When going out to events and activities and taking photos be aware of the following guidelines.

Example:
Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals had recently played 18 holes of golf at the Vail Golf Course. We took many photos on the day, and want to blog about the activity, put our pictures on our website, use these pictures for our golf package marketing campaign, use these pictures on our constant contact, write a press release about the activity, submit our photos to a competition online, etc. What we can’t think of yet, we want to be prepared.

Name of the Event:
Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals Golf Outing at the Vail Golf Course

SEO STEPS TO FOLLOW

!! 1 !! Filename:
1. All words in the file name are to be capitalized, with hyphens ( – )in between, not underscores ( _ ).
2. Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals is at the end of EVERY file name.

(NOTE) – .jpg is the correct file extension. Not “.JPG”, Not “.JPEG”, Not “.Jpg”, Not “.gif”, Not “.GIF”, Not “.Gif”, ONLY “.jpg”

Importance (Proper image type is crucial) – Make absolutely sure your photographs are .jpg and not .gif. The .jpg format is standard for photographs whereas the .gif format is normally used for graphic images.

Example:
Sean-Ragsdale-Teeing-Off-The-12th-Hole-At-The-Vail-Golf-Course-Rocky-Mountain-Vacation-Rentals.jpg

Importance (For Search Engines) – the text of your URL is looked at as part of the context surrounding the image. The domain name, directory name and filename of the image (name it with keywords) are taken into consideration as far as relevance.

Example:

http://RockyMountainVacationRentals.com/Images/Sean-Ragsdale-Teeing-Off-The-12th-Hole-At-The-Vail-Golf-Course-Rocky-Mountain-Vacation-Rentals.jpg

!! 2 !! Title:
1. The title will be the same as the file name extension, yet this time, ONLY the Proper words will be capitalized, like a normal sentence.
2. Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals is STILL at the end, with a space, hyphen, space, in between our company name and the name of the file.

Example:
Sean Ragsdale Teeing off the 12th Hole at the Vail Golf Course – Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals

!! 3 !! Alt:
The Alt Tag is important because it is the text you see if a picture is still loading, or if the picture is missing. For those who are waiting, they can read what the picture will be about, thus not getting impatient.

Importance (Descriptive is key) – Search optimizers used to debate over whether ALT text had any influence on rankings. That debate is over. Optimize your images using descriptive keyword-rich ALT text. Don’t stuff the ALT attribute. Make it short and to the point. The keyword rich ALT text for your images could be the tie-breaker over who gets the top spot, so always use it.

In Addition – Use the word “picture” or “photo” in your ALT text. Some searchers do use those words when they search for images.

Example:
Photo – Sean Ragsdale Teeing off the 12th Hole at the Vail Golf Course – Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals

Picture – Sean Ragsdale Teeing off the 12th Hole at the Vail Golf Course – Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals

!! 4 !! Description:
Descriptions are important because they can offer detailed information about the photo, and where permitted, this information is very helpful for SEO.

Example:
During our trip to the Vail Golf Course, Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals enjoyed 18 rounds of golf, lunch, and great networking opportunities. Here we have Sean Ragsdale teeing off on the 12th hole.

!! 5 !! Keywords:
Keywords and Keyphrases are helpful in all search engines. You must approach your keywords and keyphrases with thought on the following: If I typed in “this keyword” or “this keyphrase” would I want to find “this picture”. We obviously want future clients to find us however possible, but we want them to be our targeted demographic.

(NOTE) – Still under debate – If someone typed in “golf swing”, will they want our picture for swinging purposes? For a project about golf? For golf club buying purposes? For renting a Vacation Rental in Vail so they can golf at the Vail Golf Course?

Example:
vail golf, golfing in vail, vail golf course, golf courses in vail, golfing packages, rocky mountain vacation rentals

Importance (For Bloggers that use Images) – Images can rank based on what surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc. on the page. Image-only sites generally only work well if it is an extremely well-known brand or product. Otherwise, you need keyword rich text. Using a keyword or keyphrase in the heading, or around the image that has been placed into the post, would GREATLY help.

Example:
Everyone enjoyed golfing that day, including Sean Ragsdale, seen here teeing off the 12th Hole. ( Picture ) The Vail Golf Course was very hospitable to all the Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals staff.

!! 6 !! People in Photo
For Press Release Purposes, photos are used, and information regarding to the people in the photo can be helpful.

Example:
(from right to left): Sean Ragsdale
(from right to left): Tommy Z. Hoffman, Alana Hanks, James Bengala

Tags:
(For Bloggers) Tags are used for Blogs, in groups called tag clouds, that help blog readers search inside the blog site. These are similar to keywords and keyphrases, but are different in that they are used for locating blog posts, not locating photos. When a blogger is using photos, these photos must relate to the blog in a way that the keywords or keyphrases can be used as tags as well.

Higher rankings can lead to bigger exposure and more traffic.  Yet, this is a fraction of what real SEO can do to help your business.

The only way for you to do business is to have the public trust you.  They need to know what your company is all about.  What do you do? Why are you special?  This is where SEO kicks in.

Getting your business noticed online, through blogs, social media, forums, is all necessary when communicating to potential and existing clients.

Try and develop a relationship with your clients.  They need to be interested in your company, and like you.  If you can set up relationships where information is shared in a friendly manner, this will help build trust and respect for your company.  If your business is found trustworthy and respectable, business will continue to grow for you.

It is all about high quality content that deals with WHO YOU ARE.  If you offer valuable information, then you are showing your clients how important it is for you to inform your clients of useful information.

• Google XML Sitemaps – Create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your blog – Downloads 954,459

• NextGEN Gallery – A full integrated Image Gallery WordPress plugin with a Flash slideshow option – Downloads 715,819

• WP.com Stats – You can have simple, concise stats with no additional load on your server by plugging into WP.com’s stat system – Downloads 712,71

• WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine that produces static html files – Downloads 492,637

• Contact Form 7 – Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible – Downloads 393,916

• Automatic upgrade – Allows a user to automatically upgrade the installation to the latest one – Downloads 288,600

• Sociable – Automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites to your posts, pages and RSS feed - Downloads 284,117

• Viper’s Video Quicktags – Allows easy and XHTML valid posting of videos from various websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and more – Downloads 254,807

• Simple Tags – The successor of Simple Tagging Plugin and is THE perfect tool to perfectly manage your WP tags – Downloads 254,353

• WP-DB-Backup – On-demand backup of your database – Downloads 250,795

• Google Analytics – Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics – Downloads 239,837

• Google Analyticator – Same as the one above, enables Google Analytics tracking - Downloads 229,970

• Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Helps readers share, save, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious and over 100 more – Downloads 226,056

• WP-Polls – Adds an AJAX poll system to your blog. You can also easily add a poll into your blog post / page – Downloads 222,196

• Sidebar Widgets – Adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu – Downloads 221,024

• podPress – A dream WordPress plugin for podcasters – Downloads 207,491

• WP-PageNavi – Adds a more advanced paging navigation your blog – Downloads 204,005

The great thing about Photoshop is that it is actually fun to work with – I never met someone getting annoyed or bored working with the program. You can learn how to work the different features of Photoshop step by step by yourself. After a couple weeks learning all the great tools the program offers you will create incredible images and displays.

There are thousands of tutorials and lectures out there on how to use Photoshop. But most of them are very advanced and assume you already know the basics of Photoshop. If you are a very beginner and you never actually worked with Photoshop you should look at this tutorial.

I really like this article- you should check it out!

Check it out here !!!

Source:  http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/design/learn-web-design/

source: http://www.blogohblog.com/20-killer-image-sliders-carousels/

-Sean Ragsdale

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) targets different kinds of search engines reaching from image, video and local search to industry specific vertical search engines.

In order to improve the ranking of a website or webpage you have to optimize the website’s content and HTML and related coding. To appear high in the search result your website needs to become indexed by the search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Becoming indexed means that the search engines crawled your page and “know” the content of your specific webpage. As better links, contents and descriptions are on your webpage as better and more precise is the index from the search engine. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in this process. Knowing what people are looking for and what they will type in the search engine and then accordingly editing the content and HTML is key in getting ranked high. That involves research on highly ranked pages and knowing effective and successful long tail keywords which helps the overall search result.

If, for example, you specialise in logo design, you’ll want your site to come up high on the search rankings for whenever potential clients type in ‘logo designers’. The single most effective way to get ranked higher on somewhere like Google, is to have a large number of sites (with high Google page ranks themselves) linking to yours. Google loves this.

One way of attracting several links to your site or blog is by submitting it to a range of web directories. These are online databases that classify websites that have been submitted according to their content. Once a site has been added to the directory, it will attract links from category pages full of sites that are relevant to the niche of that site.

Here is a list of 10 directories you can submit to for free:

1. Dmoz – dmoz.org

2. Web World Index – webworldindex.com

3. Librarian’s Internet Index – lii.org

4. Jayde – jayde.com

5. Little Web Directory – littlewebdirectory.com

6. Simple Directory – simple-directory.net

7. Intestyle – intestyle.com

8. I Web Info – iwebinfo.com

9. Web Directory – bizdirects.com

10. Turnpike Directory – turnpike.net

source: redlemonclub.com

Spring Marketing with Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals

rmvrMedia is working this spring with Rocky Mountain Vacation Rentals here in Vail, Colorado, on their Spring and Summer Marketing Campaign. Details include creating e-mail blasts, adding special landing pages, and creating call-to-action graphics.  Our commitment to Rocky Mountain’s Advertising is very strong, and the staff are very warm and welcoming to creative ideas coming from our web design team.