Google will begin sending photographers to a city near you to take photos of the inside of your business. This new feature will complement your Google Places (previously called Google Local Business Center) listing. Instead just having Street View photos of your business, Google is now adding “a new way for you to showcase your business to the world.”

And to top it all off, Google will send the photographers to your location for free! All you have to do is apply.

Right now the Google photographers are only visiting select cities in the US, Japan, and Australia. But Google says “demand will help us decide where to send our photographers next.”

Select US Cities Google has photographers:

• Atlanta, GA
• Boston, MA
• Chicago, IL
• Denver, CO
• Detroit, MI
• Houston, TX
• Indianapolis, IN
• Jersey City, NJ
• Hoboken, NJ
• Kansas City, KS
• Last vegas, NV
• Los Angeles, CA
• Miami, FL
• Minneapolis, MN
• Nashville, TN
• New York, NY
• Philadelphia, PA
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Portland, OR
• San Antonio, TX
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• San Jose, CA
• Seattle, WA
• St. Lois, MO
• Washington D.C.

Learn more about the Google Business Photos and the select cities they’re in.

On Friday, Google announced on their official blog, 3 new enhancements that will make searching easier.

More Localized Google Suggest They rolled out a version of Google Suggest that is tailored to specific areas in the U.S. When you do a search, the queries beneath the search box seem more locally relevant than it used to.

Spelling Enhancements for Names Google noticed that when people search for names of those they are not familiar with, they often struggle with the spelling. Google’s new technology is based on the concept that people often know something else about the person besides the spelling of their name. The correct name shows up in the “did you mean” link:

Spelling Auto-Correction in 31 Languages Another improvement to the Google spelling system is auto-correction, which started in the US this past December. Google auto-corrects if they are highly confident in their correction in order to get the user information faster. They expanded last week to 31 languages!

I think these 3 improvements all have great benefits for faster searching, but think it’s weird that Google can now read my mind.

We’ve done a couple posts about Google taking the speed of a website into consideration when ranking it. This week Google officially posted on their blog about site speed.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

Google also gives some resources to go along with their post on site speed for site owners or webmasters to utilize:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Site speed is just another trust metric that Google is adding to the long list of ranking factors. It makes sense to add it and I think it has played a part for a long time. If a site can’t load, or loads very slow, the crawler that is trying to index the site will leave. It also makes the user question why the site is taking so long if it is visibly lagging.

I wrote about TOPSEO’s earlier this month. Since I’m new to TKG, I asked around to see if we would’ve gotten involved with this organization years ago and the consensus was “no.” So I spent some time on the site to determine how our content could have made it onto the site. Just by looking at our profile and seeing the character encoding errors, it is likely that the content was scraped from other sources. We’re pretty thorough professionals here at The Karcher Group. If someone from within our company submitted company information and a case study, I would expect them to have noticed the wacky character errors before having it published. There is little doubt that we would have let this pass, especially if this was a paid listing.

Take a look at our company profile listing:

Notice the yellow highlighted character encoding issues.

It looks as if they scraped the content from ClevelandSEO.com (a reputable local organization that we affiliate ourselves with).

Earth to TKG – Contacting Ourselves

I attempted to send a lead to TKG from our TOPSEO’s company profile. I clicked a button that clearly stated: Contact The Karcher Group:

Note how the text reads.

After clicking the link, a modal window popped up with a contact form. Once again, the heading read “Contact the Karcher Group.”

Personal details blurred out, but notice the heading once again.

I entered my personal email address, my personal phone number, and a message that read:

I’d like someone from the Karcher Group to call me ASAP. I need help with a $500k project with LeBron James. Thanks!

After submitting the form, I was taken to a confirmation screen that once again acknowledged that the email was sent to The Karcher Group:

My original intent for this whole test was to see how TOPSEO’s would go about contacting TKG. Would they send the company an email through our sales email address? Would they try to call us? Would I get a response to my personal email address? I was a little surprised with what happened next…

I received an email from a local web marketing company, SageRock. The email reads as follows:

Hello,

My name is Sage Lewis. I’m the president of SageRock… a leading Web Marketing agency located in Akron Ohio. We’ve been doing high end Web marketing since 1999.

I’m involved with TopSeos.com. That’s how I got your message.

Is it possible that I might be able to help you?

Thank you,
Sage Lewis

http://www.sagerock.com

Conclusions

From a client perspective, it would be frustrating to think you’re contacting one company when they reiterate it over and over again, only to receive a response from another company. Users should be able to trust TOPSEO’s because they call themselves an “Independent Authority on Search Vendors.” But when they pass your details on to another company, how can you trust them to be “independent?”

Twitter is set to show ads to 2-10% of users beginning today. According to Sean Garret of Twitter, they will begin to roll out “Promoted Tweets” via the search pages.

Best Buy, Virgin America, and Starbucks are among some of the first companies to try our the new advertising platform on Twitter.

From the New York Times:

“The idea behind Promoted Tweets is that we want to enhance the communications that companies are already having with customers on Twitter,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer.

“When people are searching on Starbucks, what we really want to show them is that something is happening at Starbucks right now, and Promoted Tweets will give us a chance to do that,” said Chris Bruzzo, vice president of brand, content and online at Starbucks.

It will be interesting to see how the new ad platform will be received by Twitter users and more importantly, how this will effect Twitter’s future.

Read more about Twitter & its new advertising model at The New York Times.

The newspaper industry has been struggling over the last few years as people are turning to the Internet for their news. Newspapers and their supporters have been quick to blame Google for their problems. They know that Google provides the majority of their site traffic, but they are not happy that it is free. It was very interesting to hear Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, give advice to the newspaper industry

Despite their differences, Schmidt gave hope to the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) that things will get better. He spoke to the ASNE last night in Washington DC about the future of newspapers on the Internet in a very positive tone.

Schmidt said, “Newspapers will make money once again, but it will be from online advertisements and an altered subscription model.” In addition, Schmidt explained that Google is currently working on new ways to modify ads and content for consumers, based on their preferences. Schmidt advised that news needs to be more personalized and that news sites need to be tailored to mobile devices to continue growing.

Schmidt’s words took a negative tone when he addressed bloggers by saying that quality newspaper journalism is “an art”. This implied that blogging is less than newsworthy, angering bloggers worldwide.

Schmidt wasn’t able to provide many details but he did imply that Google is working on developing solutions for the dying newspaper industry. Newspapers rely heavily on Google to provide traffic to their site, so it might be worth swallowing their pride to work with the Search Engine giant. Check out Frank Reed’s post on Marketing Pilgrim to learn more.

The past week has been pretty eventful in the SEO community. An entrepreneur named Charles Preston tried to launch a service for the SEO community. This service was going to help both consumers and SEO’s alike. Basically, to be a “verified SEO” you would have to pay his company a monthly $99.00 fee. In addition to that, you would also send the company a list of your clients so that they could contact them and verify the services you were offering.

It was all started over at Sphinn.com by Edward Lewis:

Charles Preston. An SEO out of Austin, Texas have decided that he along with other Industry Veterans are going to start a Verified SEO service. You the SEO will pay them $99.00 per month, it was $199.00 when first launched, to give them most of your client information. They in turn will do who knows what with that information and then give you a dynamic Verified Pro SEO Badge for your website.

I’ve been pinging this young man on Twitter for a few days now to find out who the Industry Veterans are behind this new organization. He has not answered. Most of you know I’ve had my ear to the ground in this industry for quite some time, why have I not heard of Charles Preston? And, who are the Industry Veterans behind Verified SEO?

Before the service could even take off the ground, the SEO community banded together and posed some very tough questions and as a result, Mr. Preston closed the site.

After the SEO community shut one service down, they’ve now banded together to take on another: TOPSEO’s. This time Alan Bleiweiss and Edward Lewis are compiling more data in an effort to expose TOPSEO’s service and those willing to pay for it. TOPSEO’s offers a very similar service, but instead charges even more money per month and offers awards on a monthly basis. As pointed out by Edward Lewis, their estimated monthly “service” nets them $55,000!!!!

So before you choose a company to help you with SEO and your Internet marketing efforts, do your research on the SEO company. Ask for case studies and testimonials. Ignore the TOPSEO badges and “awards.” Any company displaying those badges and even worse, the awards, paid for them. Chances are they didn’t earn them.