SES San Jose - Images & Search Engines

August 21st, 2007

SES San Jose 2007 - Images & Search Engines
by Laura Thieme

Shari Thurow, Omni Marketing Interactive, talked about SEO, images, and search optimization.  For newbies to search, here’s some recap:

You need keyword rich text.  Information architecture and interface which includes your page layout, URL structure.  Link development is really important.  For the images on your site, you need to provide contextual content.  SHe talked about primary vs secondary text, including title tags, visible body copy, text at the top of teh page, in and around hypertext links.  Secondary: metatags, alt tags.  Look at the Google cache of the page for http://www.artic.edu - versus the home page without images loading.  Look at the alt tags.  Shari stated that it wasn’t because of the image alt tags that were causing them to rank, it was possibly due to inbound links.

Example: Yahoo’s auto page for Nissan actually provides more context for Nissan than the actual Nissan website.  She talked about MedicineNet, specifically for heart attacks.  Cross-linking includes keywords, the alt tags are optimized, the URL, the page title, body copy all about heart attacks.  The images are also optimized heart-attack.jpg.  She recommends jpegs are hyphens instead of underscores.  File names are rarely used to determine the content of an HTML page.  Optimize your images and call it what it is.

Format graphic images correctly.  Minimize download time.  Use alt tags for your images.  Use captions and labels whenever possible.  Content surrounding the image is also required.

Liana Li Evans - Image Search, Commerce 360

Google’s Universal Search is changing the organic landscape.   Image optimization for SEO purposes, reputation management and blogging/social media are creating opportunities.  Hot 2007 Toy: Squawkers - image search in Google - it’s Squawkers McCaw showing up from a CNN Money page.  Only eight of these images were retailers who would benefit from showing up here.  Some fascinating search results for Hurricane Dean, Hilary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani.  Results can change daily.  It can quickly become an issue of reputation management.  You’ll be shocked when you see some of the Hilary’s images on Yahoo Images.

Chris Silver Smith of NetConcepts

Are social image communities doing well with pagerank?  Flickr has a page rank of 8, 160M plus pages are indexed, title, tags, H1, and links are allowed.  Others didn’t do as well across the board.  Fotki did okay and is popular in the UK.

He covered Flickr.  Title, H1, captions, tagging, cross-grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, optimal linking hierarchies, date taken and page views displayed. 

Pictures with good contrast seemed to work better in his experience.  Think creatively to optimize your site - make sure your title is unique.  Write an article.  Consider loose licensing for pictures.  He’s taken pics for major conferences and allowed press to use his pictures for free, as long as they link back to his site and mention his company.  If covering geographic location, consider using a GPS program to automatically tag.  Post as many pictures into Flickr, more pictures resulting in more traffic.  Post each picture on del.ici.ous.  If you are photo blogging, add a Digg link at the end of your text.  Add flickr pics to Yahoo Travel/Local.  Google Enhanced Search has an image labeler through webmaster tools.  Add images to businesses through Google Maps.  Google acquired Neven Vision and introduced image recognition software.  New parameters &imgtype=face for search results.

Ask.com - how can we make ourselves image search friendly?  Appealing to popular terms - be clear and direct but add qualifiers.  For example, Mackinac Island Bridge Walk 2007 - Bizresearch. 

 

Posted in SES San Jose 2007.

 

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