Continuing my live coverage of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007…

This session is on Images and Search Engines and is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

First up was Shari Thurow reviewing SEO techniques: Keywords, architecture, interface & Links.

All engines look at title tags, body copy, text at the top of the page, and in and around hypertext links.

As a rule web pages that contain both primary and secondary text will rank better than sites with just secondary text. Get content on the page, not images. Use CSS to replace graphics where possible.

Approx. 15-16% of all searches are for images. Search engines interpret a jpg to be a photo. A gif is seen to be a graphic image. Search Engines examine the text around an image for context. Make sure to name your graphic images correctly, the name counts. Use captions or labels to provide contextual cues for search engines. Optimize the entire page. Do your keyword research. Minimize download time (compression and dimensions).

Next up, Li Evans, talking about blended search (Google Universal Search). Image search is still the fastest growing vertical search. Searchers and shoppers are visual, they want to see it before they buy it.

Opportunities:

• Hot products
• Niche markets
• Comparison shopping
• Blended Search
• Reputation Management

Yesterday a search for Hurricane Dean had no images, today, there is a thumbnail picture displayed. The speed of change is fast.

Add images into the sitemap.

Your images form an impression of your brand, product or service. What do your images say about you?

Next up Chris Silver Smith. He’s talking about the potential value of social image sharing sites. The best one for SEO is Flickr, with 23 and Fotki having good optimization features. Photobucket has great PR, but does not have the ability to optimize the images.

The design of Flickr is advantageous for SEO. You can add Titles, H1, Captions, there are tags, cross grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, optimal linking hierarchies, date taken page views displayed, and an interestingness algorithm.

Make sure you have good quality pictures. pictures with good contrast tend to work better. Be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversion.

How to optimize for Flickr

• Add a unique title
• Add a description
• Tag your image with keywords
• make photos publicly viewable
• Consider loose licensing for your pictures (share them)
• Geotag the image if appropriate
• Look for groups for groups that thematically match with yours
• Share pictures with news agencies
• Post as many pictures as possible to Flickr
• Add a note into the region ofthe photo
• Post to Del.icio.us as well

Add photos to your business trough Google maps.

2 new query parameters &imgtype=face gives you faces

Chris Pierry from Yahoo talked about the poor job that search engines are doing with images, so they need to have high quality optimized images. They are looking at social networks for images. The image should be unique.

James Jeude of Ask came up next and spoke about making sure that if your site is very fast moving you should try to get inserted and highly ranked as a news / blog source in the major aggregators. Make sure to have iconic images clearly labeled and attractive enough to get links from others.

Make sure that your site is “web search friendly” as a co-requisite to “image search friendly”

Be clear and direct in the popular terms but add qualifiers if possible to reward the skilled searcher.

Put your misspellings ad synonyms in the metatags.

Filed under: Education and Training, SEO on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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