Wednesday, September 06, 2006 at 2:36 PM
By Alison Bjerke, Online Operations CoordinatorOnce upon a time, Stephen Salinas got his first job: as a house cleaner. All through high school Stephen dutifully scrubbed and dusted and vacuumed and swept. (That's what we call "work ethic training.")
Today, of course, Stephen no longer cleans homes. After graduating from San Jose State, he started with the AdWords group at Google and later transferred to the Google Base team. Now he spends most of his time supporting content providers who use AdWords ads to highlight their single-item posts. He also keeps up on the things you're talking about on Google Base Groups. If you're a newbie on Google Base, Stephen is definitely on your side -- he's also involved in a new effort to streamline the upload process for new providers and to make sure we're answering your emails as quickly as possible.
Stephen's favorite feature of Google Base is the use of attributes. We think that you know how to describe your items best, so Stephen's tip for optimizing your item page is to design custom attributes for your items. Not all items come in a specific height, version, axel length, hull width, tire size, curvature, number of bathrooms, or voltage, but maybe yours do. The more attribute-specific information we get, the easier it is for us to match your content with the right queries. Stephen's tip is right on: be creative with attributes, and send us all the relevant info that you've got.
When he's not dreaming of attribute-rich bulk uploads, Stephen hangs out in Milpitas, CA ("the greatest city between San Jose and Fremont in the world"), playing softball and wondering what life would be like if he were a law enforcement officer. (A couple years ago he thought about becoming a police officer, but decided that working for Google would be safer. At least he won't get shot at while on the job. Mom and Grandma are happy about that, he says.) And so are we.
