1. Use third party video websites

One effective SEO tactic is to stream the video from a third party website, such as Youtube, and embed the video on a website. By placing the video on a third party website, the company will receive internal traffic from the third party website while also drawing traffic to the website upon which the video is embedded, when the embedded video content is ranked high on search engines.

2. Include additional content with the video

However, the webpage that has the embedded video content should have other forms of content as well to entice the user to visit the webpage. This can be as simple as a transcription or can include additional information.

3. Use transcripts for SEO

Video transcripts can have a powerful impact on SEO because Google’s search engine cannot understand video content, but can use the transcription to appropriately rank the video content. The transcription can also improve the user experience by allowing users who cannot watch the video to instead read the transcript.

4. Include links in the video

Make sure to include links back to the main website as a way to direct traffic. The video can also mention the website by showing its URL or having the video explicitly encourage the user to visit the website.

5. Include relevant keywords in the metadata

The key to getting a video ranked for a particular search term is to include relevant keywords in the metadata. Metadata includes the video’s title, description, file name, tags and URL. The description is the most important part of the metadata, since it not only helps improve search engine rankings, but also improves the user’s experience.

6. Submit a video sitemap

All websites, especially those websites that have a large number of videos, should consider creating a video sitemap. A sitemap is a page accessible to crawlers that can access every other part of the website. This allows crawlers to find all of the videos and rank them accordingly. The sitemap should e submitted to Google Webmaster tools.

7. Link to video content

Remember to also link to videos from other websites. Links should include anchor text that contains relevant keywords, which will encourage search engines to rank videos higher for relevant terms. Including links to videos can also encourage users to move from an article on an article directory to the video on the main page, as many users prefer videos to text.

8. Always produce quality content

One factor that has always been important, but is getting increasingly more important, is the quality of content offered on the website. Search engines are increasingly using human raters to rank video content based on quality and relevance to search terms. For this reason, videos should not only have high quality standards, but must more importantly be highly useful to the user.

AdWords Has Lots of Moving Parts...It's Easy to Make a Small Mistake

Hopefully you’ve never set anything up quite that bad, but if you’re using a variety of tools to create campaigns (AdWords Editor, spread sheets, databases, etc.) the chance of errors goes up. So, we’ve developed a checklist of the areas that we want to make absolutely sure are taken care of before we turn on any AdWords campaign.

1. Network Settings

Many of our clients want their ads to only appear on the Google search results page. That is not the default setting. Google of course wants your ads everywhere, so the default setting is for the ads to run on the display network as well as Google’s Search Partners. Make sure to hit the campaign settings and double check that your campaign is showing ads where you want them shown.

2. Locations

While you’re in your campaign settings, make sure to open up the Locations and Language area and triple check on what parts of the world the ads will be displayed. If you’re in the US, the default will be the US and Canada.

3. Languages

We aren’t done with campaign settings yet. You’re already in the Locations and Languages area, so give a little extra thought to your language setting. This setting may not be what you think it is—Google checks to see what the default language setting in the searcher’s Google account. If it matches what you have checked in the language settings, your ad can be displayed to that person. Your initial reaction may be that since your keywords are English, you should only select English in the settings.

However, think about it this way—if  your keyword is in English, it really doesn’t matter what language the person’s Google account is set to. So, I (and others) suggest you be inclusive; in Chicago where there are hundreds of languages spoken, we have little reason to not also select Spanish, Polish, and all other languages. There is a high likelihood that the parents of the family set everything to Spanish, but the kids are surfing in English.

4. Daily Budget

It’s a good idea to make sure you’ve got this number right! If you’re launching more than one campaign, make sure that your budget is properly distributed among those campaigns.

5. Devices

The default is to display ads on desktops, phones, and tablets. Is there any reason to change this…like you have a special mobile campaign running?

6. Bids

We do manual bidding on all campaigns and nearly always we control the bidding at the keyword level. Before we launch, we take one last look in AdWords editor at our bids versus the first page bid estimate and the top of the page estimates. We want to make sure our bids are still in line with our strategy for the campaign.

7. Goals in AdWords and Analytics set up?

Do one last check and make sure that you have your AdWords goals in place on the website and that AdWords and Analytics are connected. (It’s also a good idea to track phone calls if you can.) It would not be good if you have to tell your client or boss that the first few days the campaign ran, you don’t know if you got any conversions.

8. Ad extensions set up to the maximum extent possible?

Dig into the ad extensions tab and set up as many of them as you can. This is the easiest and most effective way of differentiating your ads from your competitors. Google hides this tab, which means casual competitors aren’t going to even know about it.

9. Ad Rotation

I assume—since you’re an AdWords pro—that you’ve written more than one ad per ad group. You have? Good. Now, go into the campaign settings and find the Advanced Settings > Ad Delivery section. I make sure the ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ option is checked. The ‘Optimize for Clicks’ and ‘Optimize for Conversions‘ options are tempting…but I’ve seen Google’s system make bad decisions over and over with which ads it promotes and which it virtually halts. Rather than leave this incredibly important decision to a Google algorithm, have the ads delivered evenly and you go in and make the decision as to which ad is doing better; I know you’ll make a better decision.

10. Add Your Default Negative Keyword Lists

Negative keywords are one of the main tools in improving your campaigns. We have created an open source general negative keyword list. (WARNING! Some of these words are not politically correct or polite to say the least.) Before we launch any campaign we go through these lists and decide which are applicable.

11. CAREFULLY & SYSTEMATICALLY Check All Destination URLs

If you’re like me and use a lot of different tools to create an account, accidents can happen. And the one place you do not want these accidents to happen is in the destination URLs. Nothing is worse for conversions than a 404 page. Generally I spend a little time scrolling through the ads and their destination URLs inside of AdWord Editor before launching the campaign. Hopefully you’re pointing your ads at different landing pages; make 100% sure each ad is pointed at the right page.

Creating AdWords campaigns is detailed work; take just a little time before launching to make sure you aren’t making any basic mistakes.

I’d love to hear what other items are on your checklists.

Thank you to TipToe for graciously sharing the photo of the ticket-taking-machine repair guy in Tokyo.

• Google Docs Spreadsheet of Negative Keywords
  (Make sure to look at the tabs at the bottom of the screen.)
• Download in Excel
• Download in PDF

A Perfect Landing

“Landing page” may sound straightforward, but it’s actually a slippery term. Technically, a landing page is any page that a visitor to your site first sees—the page they land on. This often means the home page, but if visitors followed a link to your site, they may land on any page on your site. So every page on your website could be considered a landing page. And that means that every page on your site should have some aspects of a pure landing page.

However, for this post I’m going to be referring to landing pages from the perspective of special pages designed for visitors coming to your site after clicking on a pay-per-click (PPC) ad. These types of landing pages have a very specific goal: convert the person who clicked on your ad.

How Is a Landing Page Different from a Web Page?

Landing pages for PPC campaigns serve one main purpose: convert the person who clicked on your ad. “Converting” can be when a visitor purchases a product, fills out a form, or contacts your company. No matter how you define a conversion, the landing page should do everything possible to increase the number of people who do what you hope they will.

This is in sharp contrast to most website pages. Take a look at your home page or any other page on your website. You will probably find that these pages are for teaching: about your product, your service, your industry, or your company. Teaching is not focused on converting and therefore will not do as good a job as a dedicated landing page.

How Does a Landing Page Convert More People?

In order to accomplish the goal of converting visitors, a landing page must do a few things:

• Assure the visitor the landing page is THE ANSWER to the question they just typed into Google. This means the landing page has to follow the Goldilocks principle: don’t give the visitor too little or too much information, give her just the right amount to assure her the page is the perfect answer.
• Show the visitor very clearly how to move forward (call, write, fill out a form…whatever you need for them to convert).
• Not confuse or distract the visitor with anything superfluous. For instance, if you provide a full navigation bar, the visitor could begin wandering around your website and eventually leave.

Therefore, a landing page should be very direct, with a simple design, and contain less information than a Web page. While the lack of information might turn away some people—especially those high in the buying funnel—if done well, it will convert a higher percentage than a non-focused landing page.

What Should Be on a Landing Page?

There is no absolute list of what should be on a landing page. As with every decision in Internet marketing, the best course of action is to test multiple ideas to uncover which works best.

A few items are a must:

• Call to Action
  Rule #1 of selling: Ask for the business. Don’t be shy—make sure to tell tell visitors what they need to do to move forward. If you provide a service, you likely want the visitor to call (hopefully a unique, countable phone number) or fill out a highly visible contact form. Make sure to tell them that!

  If you are selling a product on a Web page, you need to make sure it’s clear how to place the product into a shopping cart and check out.

• Text
  Make sure to have enough text-based content on your landing page to reassure search engines that the page is directly connected to the PPC ad. Remember, the search engines can’t see pictures, and Flash is a huge challenge for them.
• Items Required by Google
  Above I mentioned that landing pages often lack full navigation, for good reason. And, although Google doesn’t like this, if you have a few items somewhere on the page (they don’t have to be prominent), it will still give you good quality scores in AdWords. That suggested list of on-page items includes:
• Link to the website’s home page.
• Link to a privacy policy.
• Link to your “About Us” page
• The keywords from the ad group, especially in the URL, the title tag, the H1 tag, and in the body of the content.
• Contact information

Should A Landing Page Scroll or Not?

There are are two competing philosophies for landing pages: keep it short or let it scroll. The former approach, which has been around for many years, is to keep the landing page as close to one page as possible, with no scrolling. This keeps the page ultra simple for the visitor and there is nothing for them to do but convert.

A newer philosophy, which has a good amount of info demonstrating its success, is to have a long landing page that requires quite a bit of scrolling. These pages usually include large pictures, perhaps videos, and lots of text. However, as you scroll down the page you are also going to see a call to action more than once (good example here at SEOmoz). This style is the favorite of a lot of the scam sites, but also with highly reputable sites, such as every product page on Amazon.

We would suggest that you try both approaches—maybe somewhere in between as well—and test to see which works best for your product or service.

Landing Pages Make Sense

Your home page has likely been designed to help funnel visitors to the page they really want on your site and to give them an overview your company, products, or services. A landing page should be designed to do everything possible to turn visitors into customers. These are very different goals.

It’s best to incorporate some landing page characteristics into every page on your site. (Can you add a small, simple contact form on every page? Is your phone number prominently displayed? Do you have a link to a privacy policy in the footer?) However, if you invest in PPC to drive people to your site, you should point them to a page that will do them, and you, the most good.

Special thanks to G.MAI for sharing the duck photo via the Creative Commons License.

Christine showed up with years of web development experience having owned her own development company. How is that possible when she just recently graduated from college? Because she is a true go-getter. She started her web development company in high school and continued it through college. She told us how she would hit the local businesses around the college and sell them custom Facebook fan pages and websites. (I won’t mention what I did between my classes…)

Christine has been here for two months now and she has accomplished a lot: she has become Google AdWords certified, learned all the inner workings of our systems, become a keyword researcher extraordinar, is a meticulous AdWords account developer, and is working diligently to improve our clients’ local SEO.

Now if her boss could just get a welcoming post up her before she posts her first blog post (about Google MCC accounts) on our site.

An MCC Account Containing Multiple AdWords Accounts

A My Client Center (MCC) Account is  an  account which Google provides to businesses and organizations that manage multiple Google Adwords accounts. An MCC account gives you one place to go where you can easily open, track, and work with multiple AdWords accounts.

Here are some common scenarios when an MCC is a great way to go:

1. You already have multiple AdWords accounts.
2. You are an AdWords manager with multiple clients.
3. You are a search marketing agency. (Kind of the same as #1?)
4. You need to set up hundreds of campaigns (ex: targeting hundreds of different towns for example). Due to the 50 campaigns per account limit, you may need more than one account.
5. You or your client  need separate invoicing for different projects, and therefore needs multiple accounts.each of the campaigns within the account.
6. You have outgrown your current account’s set up or just want to “start over” by creating a new AdWords account.
7. You have a client who has multiple accounts – In this case, you’d be linking an MCC within an MCC. (maybe a paragraph or two with a subheader that says something like, “Can one MCC account manage another MCC?”

People ignore design that ignores people.

— Frank Chimero, Designer & Author

The Big Red Buy Now Button, blinking text, multiple font styles and colors, and ALL CAPS EXCLAMATIONS!!! do not make people pay attention or feel welcome. They only make you look like the stereotypical used-car salesman.

Think of all the messages that we absorb on a daily basis. Ads at bus shelters, billboards, apps on our phones, prime time TV commercials, the magazines we read during our cardio workouts, store windows glimpsed while we’re rushing back to work … the modern world is a constant pulse of visual stimuli that clamor for our attention. Whether we like it or not our consumer brains absorb the implicit meanings and directions within those carefully constructed messages (even when we don’t notice it). Our behavior is then linked to design and we learn both good and bad habits which we apply to the next, similar situation. As designers, we really want try to elevate the reader’s experience and teach them to use our website in the most intuitive way possible. Effective calls to action are simple to understand, easy to complete, and aesthetically pleasing.

1. Let your reader know that they are in the right place. You have a lot of competition for readers attention from other websites, email pings and real-time demands. Your website homepage should let people know right away who you are and what you do with a graphic or text logo and concise, descriptive tagline.
2. Don’t talk down to your reader. People are more visually sophisticated than you might think, especially when it comes to the design (packaging) of your web content and calls to action.
3. No hoops, please. Focus the readers attention on a single task. Ask people to do something (preferably just one thing) and make it easy to achieve.

When designing your page layout you should be aware of how people scan a web page. The findings from the Nielsen Norman Group’s usability studies defined an “F-shaped pattern for reading web content”. This valuable information can help you put your important content where your readers will see it and act upon it.

From Jakob Neilson’s “F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content,” http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

The eyetracking heat maps above also show that people don’t navigate websites in a linear fashion and they tend to scan rather than read pages. This can be hard to accept knowing the hours we’ve spent crafting our awesome content. On the bright side, this understanding can help us concentrate on a few good design principles to help keep the reader engaged.

• Remember the F-shaped pattern. Don’t put the most important prompts in places where readers are unlikely to go. The top-right banner section and all the way down (scrolling … still scrolling) at the bottom of your page should not be where you have your “Sign up for my Free Newsy Newsletter!” button.
• Consistent, clear navigation. Although the home page may be more of a “squeeze” page and have a different layout than your sites inner pages, make sure you use the same names for navigation and key concepts throughout the site.
• Keep the text and ideas simple. Not simplistic, just focus on the primary purpose of the given page. Don’t try to be all things to all people. If this is your “home” page, there might be a few distinct calls-to-action but you want to be aware that there is a user capacity ceiling. We humans can only do one thing at a time, too many options will overwhelm your reader and it becomes increasingly likely that they will guess wrong and leave.
• Design your pages in blocks of easily digested, satisfying content. Clear topic headings, concise writing and illustrative graphics/photos will help break up your content and allow readers to scan your page easily.
• Make doing things super-easy. Provide a simple prompt to help the reader find what they are looking for and complete the desired actions. For example, at the end of a blog post, add a text prompt or button to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. Helping your reader find what they are looking for quickly and easily makes them feel smart!
• Use CSS buttons for important action links within your page content. People understand and like buttons.
• Test it. Check out the Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool. Google has loads of resources through their Website Optimizer blog, YouTube channel and “Google Conversion University”.

And, finally, all web designers and developers must read Steve Krug’s fundamental (and refreshingly short) book, “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”. This is also an excellent resource for website owners to educate themselves.

* This is somewhat variable depending on the type of website.

1. The client’s goals for the campaign
   
2. The buying funnel

What’s a buying funnel?

A buying funnel is a way of representing the stages a purchaser goes through on their way to buying a product or a service. Depending on the business or school of thought, it can have different numbers of stages and different names for the stages. However, a fairly basic, five-step funnel that works well for us looks like this:

The buying funnel has a direct impact on two areas of AdWords: keyword research and writing ads.

Let’s start by taking a look at the impact on selecting keywords.

How the buying funnel affects keywords selection

If you’ve been around Internet marketing at all, you’ve likely come across the the words, “long-tail keywords” and “head keywords” (also referred to as “high-volume keywords”). To get started, let’s make sure you’ve got these terms clear in your head.

So that's what long-tail keywords are

When you are doing keyword research for your AdWords campaign, you’ll likely start with the AdWords keyword tool. Google’s keyword tool provides a wide variety of keywords related to your product or service. Some of those keywords will be searched for thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe millions of times a month. These high-volume phrases are what I call “head keywords:” they tend to be short (one or two words in length) and quite general. In the graph above, they are represented by the long vertical bars to the left.

At the other end of the X axis, represented by short lines, are keywords that are not searched for very often. Long-tail keywords tend to be longer (3+ words in length) and are quite specific; searchers may include make, model, color choices, and even model numbers. They are called long tail because of the shape of the graph above: these low-volume keywords can continue to the right for a long, long way, making a long tail on the graph.

Imagine you sell bicycle trailers online, which our client, Wandertec, does very well (see our SEO case study). When you do keyword research you’ll find that people search for the keyword, “bike trailers,” more than 150,000 times a month. For your products, that’s a lot of searches, so “bike trailers” is a definitely a head keyword. One of the products that you sell is the BOB Ibex trailer; you check the keyword tool for “BOB Ibex Bike Cargo Trailer” and find that it’s only searched for 16 times per month. It’s a true long-tail keyword in that it doesn’t have a lot of volume and has at least three words in it.

How are keywords and buying funnels related?

Let’s take the graph we were looking at earlier and turn it on its side.

Double it for good measure and the funnel is pretty clear (see below).

How the buying funnel relates to keywords

The head keywords (in my examples above are: “pourover coffeee”, “bike trailer”, etc.) are the types of keywords someone would use at the top of the buying funnel—just becoming aware of a product or service. On the other hand, people use long-tail keywords (such as “stainless steel pourover coffee kettle” and “BOB Ibex bike cargo trailer”), when they are shopping or ready to buy.

Therefore, people who use long-tail keywords are much more likely to convert than those using head keywords: they have learned about the product or service and are using those long-tail keywords to get further details or to try to find the best deal.

The buying funnel and ad writing

One of the keys to writing compelling ads is to make sure the copy resonates with the searcher. Knowing about where the keyword is in the buying funnel helps you make educated guesses on ad copy. If consumers are at the top of the buying funnel, your copy should encourage their curiosity and desire to learn more. If the keyword is at the bottom of the buying funnel, you might want to begin focusing on the factors that are going to help them make the decision of whether to buy from you.

Let’s continue the bicycle trailer examples. You’ve got an ad group in your campaign that is focused on head keywords that are all similar to “bike trailer.” Ads that would appeal to individuals at the top of the buying funnel might encourage them to learn more about different types of bike trailers and how they can be used.

Someone who is low in the buying funnel is likely much more interested in pricing, shipping costs, and the reliability of the seller.

Where in the buying funnel do you want to focus?

Depending on your campaign’s goals, you will likely focus on different keywords. If your goal is to educate people about your product or service—that is, if your site is set up to nurture people through the buying funnel—you likely want to focus on head keywords. This approach often works well for  high-end or complicated products and services.

Imagine you’re looking for a way to use the Internet to market your B2B products and services; these are products and services that often have long buying funnels. A strong strategy is likely going to focus on head keywords to bring people high in the buying funnel to a website that will establish your credibility and expertise before moving down the buying funnel with most potential customers. With B2B Internet marketing, we seldom find long-tail keywords that are productive.

It is also true for luxury consumer products; one client that fits this description is Conservatory Craftsmen—a custom conservatory builder. Their products are costly and completely custom, so it’s important that people who are interested in a conservatory learn about them and come away feeling Conservatory Craftsmen are experts. By attracting people high up in the funnel, Conservatory Craftsmen have the opportunity to educate their potential clients and fully demonstrate their expertise.

However, there is of course a downside to focusing on head keywords. They tend to have much higher competition from other AdWords advertisers and be more expensive—that is, you will have to bid higher and/or have better quality scores to be competitive with all of those others wanting to show ads for the same keywords. And with that expense comes an additional challenge: a lot of the people who search for head keywords are probably “only looking,” so you’re paying to help them “just look.”

On the other side of the coin, if you are simply interested in finding the people who know what they want, then long-tail keywords are for you. Let’s say you bought a pallet of 8 GB flash drives direct from a Chinese manufacturer and want to sell them online. You don’t need to teach people about these products; you just need to convince them that you have exactly what they’re looking for and at prices, quality levels, and service levels they want. If that’s your business, you will likely have much more success going with long-tail keywords focused on things like color, size, price, and features.

Long-tail keywords have fewer competitors bidding on them, so they tend to be considerably less expensive than head keywords. The other benefit of long-tail keywords is that you have a much greater chance of searches actually converting since they probably know what they want. The catch with long-tail keywords is that they aren’t searched for all that often, so you have to cast a wide net and go after a lot of them, which require organization and systems when setting up your AdWords account.

Put a fine point on it

Identifying the right keywords is both science and art. While setting up an AdWords account, you should select them based on your campaign’s goals. You also have to keep in mind how those goals are reflected in the buying funnel. With this knowledge you can then judge the keywords based on where they are in the buying funnel.

Thanks to Jory for sharing the pourover coffee photo via the Creative Common’s license.

We decided to team up with Scott and collaborate on our first response: “How B2B companies can unlock the value of online marketing.” In it, we highlight a fairly simple and proven path to create a solid B2B marketing campaign online from the ground up.

Over the next few months, we will be updating and expanding on these concepts (both for the specific white paper campaign, as well as bringing in more aspects of the online marketing ecosystem). Check back here at the Chicago Style SEO blog or at the Leff Communications blog for our ongoing discussions.

How To Crop a Photo Using Preview

Cropping means removing part of the photo—literally cutting out a part of the photo you don’t want in the picture. Let’s take a look at an example of how to crop.

Suppose you were out to lunch with your mom and took this lovely photo of her:

Who is that guy in the background?

You just want the picture of your mom without the photobomb in the background. Using Preview it’s easy to get rid of him.

1. Open the file in Preview; you have several options: double click on the photo;  launch Preview and then using “File > Open” dialog box; or drag the photo onto the Preview icon.
2. Make sure the crop icon is clicked and looks like in the photo below. You have several cropping shape options: rectangle, elliptical, lasso (free hand), smart lasso (Preview tries to grab what it thinks you want), and Instant Alpha (where it removes the background). For this example, we’re just going to look at the most commonly used: the rectangle. (See the red circle in the image below.)
   
3. With the cropping tool selected, draw a rectangle around the area of the photo you want to keep. Once you draw the rectangle you can adjust it using the white drag buttons in the corners and the sides. You can see in the image below I’ve drawn a rectangle around “mom.” You can also see the little white drag buttons in the corners and on the side.
   
4. Once you have the cropping rectangle adjusted to how you want it, select “Crop” from the “Tools” dropdown menu or press Command+k. You will then have a picture that looks like this…no photobomber in the background:
   

How To Resize a Photo using Apple Mac’s Preview

Most cameras these days, by default, take HUGE photos: thousands of pixels wide at at resolutions that are much more than what a webpage needs. Nearly all of the time,  you need to take the time to resize the photo a little before uploading it to your website. Why is this important? If you upload a huge file it will take a long time to upload and will take a lot of space up unnecessarily on the server. Also, many content management systems (CMS) have a size limit they will allow you to upload; often the limit is 10 MBs. Most importantly, if your website’s CMS doesn’t resize photos, every time someone looks at the page, you will send out a huge photo that will create a very slow webpage because it will take quite a long time for the person reading your webpage to download the huge image. And, the search engines don’t like oversized photos and will penalize your web site for loading slowly.

Here’s how you use Apple’s built in Preview application to resize…it’s easy:

1. Open the file in Preview either by double clicking on the photo, launching Preview and then selecting “Open” from the “File” pulldown menu, or dragging the photo onto the Preview icon.
   

   Isn't she darling?

2. Save a copy of the file! Don’t work on the original file; if you make a mistake on a copy, you can always go back to the original and start over. If you save over the original…it’s gone for ever. So, select “Save as…” from the “File” pull down to make a copy in OSX 10.6 or older. In OSX 10.7 (Lion), you will need to select “Duplicate” from the “File” pulldown menu.
3. Select “Adjust Size…” from the “Tools” pulldown menu
   
4. A dialog box will open that will show you a lot of information about the picture. You’ll easily see the size of the photo in either inches or pixels. In the example below, Preview is set to pixels. You will also see the size of the file in MBs. You will also see the resolution, which in the example is 300.
   
5.  Most photos on the web can be much, much smaller than the example above. Some numbers to shoot for:
• Width/Height
  Very seldom are pictures on a webpage larger than 500 pixels on their longest side. The picture above is 300 pixels wide to give you an idea of the width you’re looking for. Note that Preview, by default, locks the proportions of the picture so you don’t end up with stretched images.
• Resolution
  Photos for the web should be set to a resolution of 72 pixels/inch.
• File Size
  You want the file size to be as small as possible. All the photos on this page are less than 50 KB (0.5 MB) By adjusting the  width/height and the resolution of the photo, you will likely bring the file size way down. See the image below—by adjusting the photo to 500 pixels wide (Preview automatically calculated the width to 333 pixels) and a resolution of 72 pixels/inch, the image went down to 46 KB. In the save dialog (we’ll talk about it below) you can further adjust this.
  
6. The last step is to save the file. Preview gives you several options of file types, but the most common is JPEG. The main reason to switch is if the picture has a transparent background, you will have to use PNG. In the image below, you will see that you have a slider that allows you to adjust the quality of the image. If you’ve reduced the size and resolution above, the image will be quite optimized already. As a general rule, I leave the slider at about the 3/4 of the way toward “Best.”
   

Wrap Up

Preview is an amazingly powerful tool that Apple gives to every Mac owner for free; cropping and resizing are just two of the many things it can do for you.