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Custom photo-portfolio Web site maker liveBooks has added new online marketing tools to its Professional-level packages. The new tools are designed to increase traffic to the portfolio Web sites liveBooks builds, and to raise photographers' online profiles through search engine results. According to liveBooks, research shows that "more than 80 percent of Internet users first find Web sites through organic search."
While the Flash-based Web sites that liveBooks builds for clients are very visually appealing, they do not make as much information available to search engines as HTML sites. HTML pages can associate large amounts of text information, or metadata, with images. That allows people who are using words to search for images to find them via text-based search engines. The enhanced liveBooks Professional accounts will automatically generate HTML versions of clients' Web sites, and will allow photographers to enter keywords, names, descriptions, and other metadata. liveBooks will also automatically import IPTC and EXIF metadata that photographers have added to images as part of their image-processing workflow. The HTML sites will be updated automatically whenever photographers make changes to their Flash-based sites. Viewers will continue to see the Flash-based portfolios, while associated HTML sites function behind the scenes to draw search engine traffic.
Photographers will also have the option of generating an HTML search landing page for their sites to further improve their ranking in search engine results. The landing pages will provide an overview of the photographer's Web site and link to the associated Flash-based portfolios. liveBooks has also added enhanced Google Analytics support to its set of features for Professional clients. Account holders will now be able to see page-by-page reports on the traffic their site is attracting.
The new features will be delivered to all liveBooks Professional customers for no additional fee via a site upgrade that is scheduled to take place during March 2008. Three liveBooks Professional packages are available: Unlimited, Select, and Basic. For more information on them and the new online marketing tools, go to the liveBooks Web site.
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