How Flickr & Photos Can Get You More Customers

If you notice, when you search for something on Google, your results may include links to pages, links to business entries, ads, videos and photos.

This is known as “blended search results.”

Pretty soon, you’ll be seeing individual tweets from Twitter.com in the results as Twitter has just made their tweet database available to the search companies to index.

But today, I want to point out and talk about the photos.

Most of the time if you search for something on Google that has a lot of photos available on the web (like any female celebrity, for instance), one of the first results will be a selection of between 5 and 7 photos of that topic/celebrity.

This is because most people honestly would rather have pictures to look at when they search for something, especially when what they are searching for is a very visual – like decorative concrete samples.

In a previous article, I shared with you how much Google loves video, well Google also loves pictures as well, and even has an entire section of their search portal devoted solely to pictures called Google image search.

Many people even go straight to Google images to search for something in an effort to only get pictures on a particular topic.

Here’s where photo indexing sites like Flickr.com and Googles own Picasa come in handy.

These are popular photo indexing sites that Google and the other search engines crawl and index on a regular basis.

They allow you to (with a free account) upload your pictures, give each picture a title, a description and a list of tags (for filing/indexing/searching purposes) and publicly post them online for the whole world to see.

If you take photos of completed jobs, and describe them and title them and tag them with words that describe your business, and location, then when potential customers search for a solution to their ugly concrete, your pics will show up in the search results.

If you make sure and put your contact information in the description box, then these potential customers can turn into bonafide customers when they call or email you.

Make sure to take advantage of sites like Flickr and Picasa today.

And always have a camera with you.