Bloggers to improve Estonia's image in Google
21.01.2010, 09:58A large number of Estonian bloggers have responded to the initiative of improving Estonia's national image in search engines like Google, writes the online edition of Eesti Ekspress weekly.
The objective is to make sure that whenever a person enters "Welcome to Estonia" in the Google search engine of images, he or she will see beautiful pictures of Estonia instead of the current random choice of images.
The initiative came from Kaupo Kalda, creative manager of web solutions provider Okia, who in his blog, Facebook, Twitter and various forums urged patriotic bloggers, photographers and search engine specialists to improve Estonia's national image.
"Please add to your galleries or blogs one beautiful photo of Estonia and as file name or caption include the text "Welcome to Estonia." Kalda also advised to include links to other similar pages.
One blogger by the name of Celtic wrote in his blog that the action is very simple - one must find a critical number of people who would post in their blogs a series of beautiful photos of Estonia. "Then Google would go over these pages, index the images according to alt tags and, as an additional bonus, increases the keyword score if it then finds another page with similar content, explains Celtic.
Comments posted in Kalda's blogs show that tens of fans have made it their duty to improve Estonia's image. According to Kalda, it would take about four weeks to have the results. This is probably true since when Eesti Ekspress searched for "Welcome to Estonia" under Google images, the result was a list of partying, nature and random images.
What is noteworthy is that data of Google itself shows that people google the text "Welcome to Estonia" about 3,600 times a month.
Also Leitti Mändmets, brand manager of Enterprise Estonia, welcomes the initiative. In an interview to Eesti Ekspress, Mändmets said that all actions that help to improve Estonia's image are welcome. "Social media, civic initiative and narrow interest groups are becoming more and more important. In this situation an initiative of a fairly small group of people could well have a better result than a huge effort by some formal organization," said Mändmets, adding: "I'll be looking forward to be best outcome."