Today I set up a Flickr account to showcase my personal and professional photos. Flickr is an amazing site that has so much to offer anyone that enjoys photography, and they are considered a leader among the new Web 2.0 sites.
After spending a little time looking through a portion of their vast photo archive, I’ve a found a few ways that a small business could take advantage of this online service for self promotion.
Flickr offers written “comments” and “tags” to be added to your photos to help other photo enthusiasts locate images that interest them. Why not use this to show photos of your products, or ‘before and after’ photos of your services? Write the “comments” and “tags” using appropriate keywords that your customers would use, along with your web site URL, and you might just start attracting new business that never would have known about you otherwise.
At the time of this writing, Flickr did not include the dreaded “no follow” attribute to these links, which means that search engines should be able to find and visit your site through these hyperlinks.
I put this experiment to the test with a few Sundowner photos I shot for Burkhalter Trailer Sales. I loaded the comment field with appropriate descriptive keywords and after just a couple weeks I noticed that Google put this Flickr page on the first page of results when I searched those exact keywords.
Try this with other sites that allow user input such as Google Maps, Wikipedia, and various blogs – especially if they allow search engines to follow your hyperlink. The internet is about sharing information and knowledge, and the more valuable information you can offer the internet community about your products and services, the greater the results you’ll generate in the long run.
