Day 2
Track 2: Images & Search Engines
Panel Members:
Liana Evens of Commerce360
Chris Smith of Netconcepts
Shari Thurow of Omni
Cris Pierry of Yahoo! Search
James Jeude of Ask.com
I feel like I’m stalking Sheri Thurow of Omni Marketing Interactive here :) Do they like clone her and have her in every session? Again, she is on the panel. Understand why. I love her. I think she is a great teacher! She gets my attention and keeps it. She's witty too and maybe a little passive aggressive like me-ish. LOL :)
This session was all about optimizing images for the search engines. Universal search (Google's new search system) will be changing the way we search by integrating listings not only from its standard web sites, but also from video, images, local and book search engines, news and blogs.
First and foremost, if you want your images to get indexed and not to interfere with your current or desired rankings, here are some tips for optimizing your images or image intensive sites...
Use secondary text! - Integrate keywords relating to the images around the image. Here are some secondary text options:
1. Title tag
2. Header tag
3. Anchor text
4. Breadcrumbs
5. Cross linking
6. Description text
7. Intro text
8. Image name (domainnamehere.com/keyword_image.jpg)
9. Page name (domainnamehere.com/keyword_page.htm)
10. Captions
11. Labels
Quick Fact: Although search engines can't necessarily read or recognize images right now, they can indicate color and faces to differentiate sex. Wonder how they recognize Janet Reno.
Remember, if you are looking to optimize your images, you probably offer services of photography or stock images. The number of searches ending with “pictures,” “pics,” “pix,” “images,” “photography,” etc. is increasing rapidly. You must include those keywords in your page and image factors mentioned above. Feel free to do a quick search in Overture or WordTracker to see what terms follow your main keyword.
The next speaker was Liana Evans of Commerce360. She asks us…Why should we care about images and search engines? The answer…because it’s the 2nd fastest growing vertical search. Anyone wanna guess the first? Post your comments!
Quick Tip #1: Be sure to include an image with your press releases.
Quick Tip #2: Be sure to create a site map for your images to feed to Yahoo! And Google.
Our final speaker was Chris Smith of NetConcepts who taught us about the wonderful world that is Flickr. With Flickr you can upload photos to their file sharing website where your photo can drive lots of traffic. The site itself already gets ranked well so its quick to index new content. Especially WELL OPTIMIZED CONTENT. What does that include? Check the list up top again.
Then be sure to add or utilize the following:
1. Add tags with keywords.
2. Make it public! – Allow usage of the images for a mere link back. That link is more valuable than you know. You may not be getting money for your images, but the link is priceless when it drives REAL MONEY MAKING TRAFFIC to your site.
3. Associate your site with Del.icou.us
4. Blog about your photo. – Even try and get a Digg link.
5. Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Local also allow for adding of images. Utilize that folks! Don’t you like to see what the place you are staying at looks like? If you have 5 options and 2 have images, you will probably decide which of the 2 look best to begin your research. If it has the amenities you like, you buy. Done. One for the image site. Zero for the rest of you un-optimized sites!
6. Google Webmaster Tools allows for photo submission. Users are also encouraged to tag your photos, helping your keyword exposure.
7. Use social networks! Get your photo out to blogs and other social networks for users to generate content to support your image. Let them blog about you”insert main keyword here image.”
8. Alt text could be the tie breaker.. Although a lack of alt text isn’t the end all for ranking in the search engines, it can be what puts you ahead of your competition when you both have done everything else correctly.
***Remember, the alt tag was originally intended to assist those with sight disabilities. Be sure that your alt tags MAKE SENSE! Only integrate a keyword if it makes sense. And don’t worry about how long your alt tags are either. They need to be just long enough to help describe the image without losing the users attention.***
9. Users will often time misspell terms including both your main keyword and the secondary “image” term. Users are often using slang for such searches, including “pix,” “pics,” and “fotos.”
Quick Tip #1: Add a photo of your office/physical location to your site and free listing sites like Yahoo Local and Travel.
Quick Tip #2: Google Maps too!
If you are looking for a solution for using 3 sizes of the same image (thumbnail, medium, zoom) without being penalized for duplicate content, simply use a robots.txt file to exclude inclusion of all but one of the images.
Having trouble with someone stealing your image? There are places to report!
Still have remaining questions? Want more?
Check out Liana Evans Why Care About Image Search.
or
Chris Smith's Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites.
Posted By: Angela Collins
Cal Coast Web Design
Posts
4 comments:
I think this would be a great whitepaper for photographers who are looking to do business online.
Guess it works, I need to change that pic I look like a kid: http://images.google.com/images?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enUS220US220&q=angie+weeks&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi
I always knew that adding images was important to any website but it’s good learn that Google will be looking for keywords that relate to your images. I search for “description” pix and pics quite often when I am looking for movie screenshots and the like so I can definitely see its importance and am glad that images are going to start getting read.
Making your images public even if its only for the purpose of a link back is another awesome idea. I’ve been doing this for a long time already and I’d like to see more people do this. It would help out quite a bit!
So now blogging about your images is important too? Wow, that could add up to a lot of blogs for some sites. Most website owners don’t blog now so just how important will these blogs be? I did like tip number 7 on this blog, where you state to use social networks to get people to generate comments about your images. I include a picture with 99.8% of all my blogs and the picture is information in my blog is always based on that particular image.
Does this mean we should be incorporating pics into our blogs? Would a simple caption for the picture be enough to get it indexed? I think this is a great option for almost all our clients. We could put screen shots of software up, actually post pics of products or of featured homes for real estate clients. This would definately give us more, different content for our blogs.
Great question Heidi!
Sure it does. Not all the time though. Its going to be more influential when adding to a site because we are able to edit the image name and all that jazz too but of course it helps. Because the content is so much more important though. if takes more than5 min, I would omit it. If its easy and convenient, sure, go for it!
Images grab my attention though. It will do the same for other visitors. Test it our for now and I can let you know if I have any recommendations as I review them. People with products (like purses - lol) could especially benefit from this when featuring an item :)
Post a Comment