IStock Photo provides a variety of sizes for you to select from, but which size is right for you and if you are selling images how do you know what size to make them?

When browsing IStock photo size options, it becomes rather difficult to understand which sizes are Small Medium or Large, as they often have different dimensions associated with them. The examples of image sizes below show that IStock doesn’t have a hard, fast guideline for image sizes.

If you are buying photos, the medium to Large sizes will be more than adequate for your webmaster. If using for highlights, the Small and XSmall may even be usefull. Shoot an email to your webmaster if you have any doubts.

After reviewing the IStock Photo FAQ’s we see that item number four (see excerpt below) implies that IStock Photo resizes the images when uploading for sales.

What are the specs required for images to be uploaded or rules for uploading?

1. Images must be RGB JPG format only
2. You must own the full copyright to any image you upload. This means you must be the photographer or artist that created the image.
3. All trademarks must be removed. This includes logos, brands and entities with copyright or trademarked elements. This many also extend to trademarked products such as cast sculptures, toys, architecture and other elements of design. Copyright is checked with each file.
4. File sizes: the bigger, the better. 300 dpi 5″ x 7″ is optimal. 640×480 images are not usable by most graphic artists. All files should be 1200 x 1600 pixels minimum (anything smaller will be automatically rejected).
5. Entering keywords and descriptions: be descriptive. Include at least 10 keywords and use a title other than ‘dog’ or ‘man’. Supplying more keywords means your image will match more searches. Images with more keywords get downloaded more often.
6. Model releases: images with clearly visible people require a model release (iStockphoto Model Release) form for legal reasons. Children in images can’t sign a model release. A legal guardian or parent must sign for all children under the age of 18 years. You will be notified if you need a model release and it can be uploaded later if you’re not sure.
7. Legal notice: uploading images/artwork that belongs to somebody else (copyright or otherwise) will result in a suspended membership and in some cases may have legal ramifications.
8. Your account profile must have your full, real first and last names, and mailing address entered before completing an application. Anyone uploading with a fake name will be banned immediately.
9. More detailed information is available in the iStockphoto Photographer Training Manual.

Don’t get caught off guard and blow the big pitch!

First impressions can be everything – use multiple browsers!

First impressions can be everything when you are trying to sell products and services. That’s why it’s so important that you ensure your website looks good to any potential client.

For example both Google Chrome and Safari display similarly but Ie 7 and Ie 8 look nothing alike and FireFox is in a category all it’s own.

If you are a PC user you can’t assume all your website traffic will be using a PC and if you are a MAC user come on wake up! Apple has a minimal presence in the business computing world (MP3s and Cell Phones are a different story).

Don’t believe us? Check out this sample website in four different browsers!

Google Chrome	Internet Explorer 7	FireFox	Apple Safari

Now that Yahoo has decided to discontinue support for the Overture keyword suggestion tool, we need an alternatives and here they are!

• Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Digital Point Keyword Suggestions
• Self SEO Keyword Popularity Tool

The Internet Archive, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

One of their coolest features for webmasters is the Wayback Machine, aptly named for the WABAC machine used by Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman (from the Rocky & Bullwinkle show) to travel back in time.

The Wayback Machine pulls results from the Internet Archiver and allows you to view how a website used to look. This is similar to how Google allows you to view a cached version of a website, except that it keeps multiple copies. In most cases if the images in the archives are stored on the website’s own server, which means many results will appear with missing graphics.

What this means for webmasters is that in a situation where a client might have lost content from their website, the developer can copy the text from the Wayback machine results and then rebuild the page. It’s a bit of a bummer that many images won’t be available, but then it often takes much more time to write good copy than to create simple graphics.

If you want to be able to use the Wayback Machine, you will need to insure that your website’s Robots.txt is not blocking the archiver. From the sample results for saeler.com below, it’s apparent that many time periods are missing. These missing periods are from times when the archiver was blocked from accessing the website.

The main purpose of the robots.txt is to help control where the search engines go in your website; by limiting access to certain folders or files, you can help to protect your content from appearing in search results and ensure the engines only read relevant content.

A robots.txt file can make a huge impact on your WordPress blogs traffic and search engine rank, be careful not to restrict access to too many areas of your site (unless you are certain you don’t want them to appear in search results – for example tele-seminar transcripts  that are sold on your site).

Keep in mind that if you mess up the robots.txt file by blocking too much, you could lose all of your rank and much of your trafffic.

This is a sample of an SEO optimized WordPress Robots.txt file.

The basics in editing your Robots.txt are as folllows:

Allow means the engines can follow/record the specified files and folders.
Dissallow means the engines are not allowed access to files or folders.

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Gives access to the website’s root directory

Disallow: /cgi-bin
Prevents access to the cgi-bin folder used in most websites to run pearl or cgi scripts

Disallow: /wp-admin 
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: /wp-includes
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: /wp-content
Prevents access to this WordPress system folder

Disallow: somepage.htm
Prevents access to a specific page or file

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
Allows access to Google for display in image search results

#User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org
#Disallow: /
Prevents the Wayback Machine from recording your websites content.  The # means the function is turned off.

For more information on Robots.txt visit WIKI or check out this article on AskApache.com.

A recent trip to the Tucson Museum of Art provided a chance to view the “Han and Beyond – The Renaissance of China: The James Conley Collection”  exhibit. Along with the pottery often expected in such exhibits were some incredible pieces of furniture made from woods most in the Western Wood are unfamiliar with.

Once back online, the search began to find out what these woods were. In the process WIKI of course came up, but the descriptions weren’t very good, so the search continued. Ignoring the WIKI related search results provided a link to  which had a page describing the different types of wood used in Chinese furniture.

By providing this free information which the search engines recognized as relevant to the website’s content, Quing Gallery drew in traffic that was interedsted in their products (Antique Furniture).

Whatever your industry, remember you never know what will make the sale unless you try, so create a draw for your target market Organically through free information on your website or Virally through free information that can be printed or emailed.

Discover A Little-Known ‘SYSTEM’ You Can Use (Right Now) To Get TOP Rankings In MAJOR Search Engines Like Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN!

• Traffic Equalizer Levels The Playing Field!

Free web site speed test to improve website performance

• Web Page Analyzer – 0.963

Weblogs.com, a VeriSign service, is a ping server that automatically notifies subscribers when new content is posted to a website or blog. Weblogs.com is the original ping service and receives millions of pings every day from blogs that configure their publishing software to notify Weblogs.com the moment content is published.

• VeriSign Weblogs Ping Notification Service

Evaluate the density of the keywords on your web pages.

• Keyword Density Calculator