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Google Goggles and Real Estate

Posted in: Blog, Marketing, Web Design by Paul McEwan on March 22, 2010

What is Google Goggles?
Imagine taking a picture of a house with your phone, submitting that picture to a Google search and getting all the listing details on it. That’s what Google Goggles will do.

Thanks to the ever advancing Google, you can now search the web by taking a picture of the item you want to know more about. While this technology is in its infancy, in 2 years it will be full blown so the question is: What does this mean for Real Estate?

Image searching. It’s not new and it works by analyzing the image name and alt tags given to the image within the HTML code. What is new is the ability to take a picture and submitting it to a search – That will affect real estate.

What are image names and alt tags?

Image Names
If you upload an image with a name DC0023854.jpg blind luck will produce any search results. Changing the image names to something like 103-548-main-st-vancouver.jpg has a much better chance of being indexed by search engines and found by someone, which hopefully leads back to your website

Alt Tags
Alt tags are descriptions written into the HTML. You don’t need to know HTML to add Alt tags. When you upload images to Facebook, flickr or Picasa (and almost any image hosting site), there is an area to add tags and many times a description.

Surprising how many images from the MLXchange describes itself as “exterior front” (the default). Please change this to the appropriate room at least. Add to the description in the MLX to help yourself further. Put the address or who it’s listed by or even your website in that additional description area. The question remains whether or not the MLXchange is adding these descriptions into the HTML as Alt tags. We know for sure that it renames the pictures. For now, who cares, let’s get used to doing this and hope the MLX will change.

Here’s the result
When someone (anyone using Google) types in a particular address of a house to get info on it, the idea is to have your listing images show up first. In the future, (a few years away), when someone takes a picture of that house for information on it, your information will show up.

It’s important to note: Adding text on the image via Photoshop (or image editing software) does not help at all.

If you feel like geeking out on this subject, read more about it here:
http://www.realestateseopros.com/blog/seo-news/google-goggles-for-real-estate-coming/

Don’t forget to contact us if you need any help with this or anything else.