For Traveling Webmasters: How to upload pages on Hobohideout.com
Step 1- Take photos of the hotel
The first step that I take when I begin making internet pages for a hotel is
to take MANY digital photographs of the hotel and the surrounding area and
tourist attractions. To do this more efficiently, I make a list of the
twenty categories (i.e. rooms, neighborhood, common areas, kitchen etc . .
.) that the photos must represent, and then keep a running checklist
of the aspects of the hotel that I have and have not yet photographed. I
find that keeping a checklist keeps me more organized and on track.
Try to make sure that the photos you take are well-lighted (sometimes
hotels are dark inside), not blurry, and are of good quality. Attempt to
take photos of clean rooms that do not yet have guests in them and, if
possible, have the hotel staff direct you to a room that they feel
represents the hotel. Take this approach into account when photographing all
other areas of the hotel.
Please remember that small photos work best - 640 x 480 JPG or JPEG
Step 2- Uploading photos
One of the main keys to making a good, search engine friendly page for
the hotels that you trade with is properly labeling your photos. Rather than
leaving your photos with general filenames like "hotel" or another such
non-specific title, make sure that each photo filename says exactly what the
photo is of. So if I take a photo of the business center of the Loft Hostel
in Budapest, I will label the file "business-center-loft-hostel-budapest" so
that the search engines will know exactly what the photo is of and be able
to index it accordingly. If your photos have ambivalent filenames - such as
dates, random numbers, or general place names - they will not be indexed by
Google properly, and the usefulness of the pages that you make will diminish
greatly.
Also, please insert dashes (-) to represent spaces inbetween words in the
photo filenames and try to use good keywords.
How to choose good keywords
Once you have taken and titled the filenames of the photos that you have
taken for the hotel it is time to upload them to Hobohideout.com and make
the webpages.
Hobohideout.com is set up to allow you to do this easily. First, you must
login to your control panel (do this by going to the top right of the
Hobohideout main page and clicking on the "log-in" link), and then choose
the hotel that you want to upload information for by clicking on the
"manage" link. From here you will be taken to a page which has links to the
twenty categories that make up the Hobohideout.com webpages. All you have to
do now is click on the category that you want to upload photos to and then
follow the prompts. Just click on the "browse" button, find the photo that
you wish to publish from the files on your computer, and then up upload it.
If you have trouble doing this, or have questions, go to this page:
How to upload hotel photos to Hobohideout.com
Step 3- Writing photo descriptions
A good rule of thumb to follow while writing photo descriptions is to
keep captions to around three sentences and to use good keywords, but do not
repeat them too often. At this time, all sentences must be in natural
English, though later we will be offering services to publish descriptions
in other languages. Please try to write descriptions for most of the photos
that you upload, even if it is just a basic description of what the photo is
of.
How to choose good keywords
To enter a photo description, just write in the box that is below the
photo that you just uploaded and click on the "update photo description"
button. Please be aware that if you change a photo after you have written a
description for it, the description will disappear and you will have to
write it again. To ensure against this make sure that you copy what you
wrote in the photo description box prior to changing photos, whereupon you
can just paste in back into the box and re-upload it.
Step 4- Making Youtube.com videos
The Hobohideout.com hotel pages allow for the inclusion of one
Youtube.com video in each of the twenty categories. But you do not need to upload a video for every category though, as two or three videos per
complete hotel site is an adequate number.
Once you have made and uploaded your videos to Youtube.com, you just need
to include the video URL (not the embed code) into the video field at the
bottom of the Hobohideout.com photo upload pages.
If you want more information on uploading videos then
Watch YouTube Video Help
If you have any questions or problems please email them to me at
VagabondSong@gmail.com
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