Tags: search engines, SES NYC, SEO, image search, image tagging

Here’s a breakdown of this session…

Chris Sherman (host) – Search Engine Land

• What we see on search engines is based on surrounding text and tags, not actual image
• Chris Sherman’s book Google Power has info on graphic image optimization for search engines.
• It’s in it’s infancy with a lot of potential
• Poses challenges for search marketers

Sheri Thurow – Grantastic Designs

• Keyword rich text – web pages should contain the words and phrases your target audience types
• Primary Text – all search engines read this to determine relevancy
• Sedcondary Text – Alt text, meta tags, domain names
• • Some search engines use these
• Alt text
• • Displays in place of pic if it does not display
  • Rollover mouse
• Alt text is NOT USED FOR RELEVANCY by the search engines
• Graphic image pages
• • Use if brand is popular
  • Depends on audience
  • Should use combo depending on usability of CSS formatted and graphic image text
• Usability test to see if use graphic image or CSS formatted
• 15% of Web searches are for images
• Alt text is useful for alt text – shows up in results
• Search engines highlight terms in url and in file name – important to put keywords in both
• Search engines rely on secondary techniques to view graphic images
• • Keywords in title tag, keywords around image (html), heading tag (primary and secondary), anchor text (top of page), breadcrumb links
  • Secondary text – alt text (use words photo, illustration, etc), put text in file name
• Utilize .gif or .jpg
• • Gif is most likely a graphic image, jpg most likely a photo
• File names more important for graphic image optimization than text-file optimization
• Use captions whenever possible, and anchor text surrounding shingles
• Use separate images for thumbnails, larger view, etc… don’t resize with html
• Use hyphens instead of underscores in image names

Liana Evans – Commerce360 Search Marketing Editor

• Image search is fastest growing vertical search
• Retail: image search is important
• Shoppers are visual – need to see product
• Google dominates image search, even more than it does contextual search
• Reputation management is important
• Find Niche Markets
• • Provide another opportunity for traffic
  • Good opportunity for small companies by utilizing image names to rank (large companies use numbers to name images, generally don’t rank)
• Major Retailers do not have a stronghold on image market
• FEEDs – make sure to give description of image in feed
• People use images for comparison shopping on sites like Froogle – no image/no sale
• Images are now incorporated in the regular search results very often (tops the list), so if you’re not ranking for your site on page one, you can get traffic through an image showing up on page one
• Reputation management: image can be tarnished by one image result through search

Chris Smith – Search Strategist for Net Concepts

• Social Image sharing sites for images valuable for SEO – inbound links, traffic, etc.
• Photobucket does not have potential SEO value – no title, tags, h1, links allowed
• Flickr has most potential – Google PR of 9, 29mil pages indexed, can link back to your own site
• Design of Flickr
• • Title tags
  • H1 tags created
  • Captions and descriptions – more relevancy
  • Linking to your own website (not no-followed as well, get link value)
  • Users Tag photos ( you do your own, and other users tag as well)
  • Cross Grouping – make common galleries for different themes
  • Comments – add to relevancy
  • Alt text
• Be broad in experimenting with subject matter of pictures intended to drive traffic
• You can optimize by writing an article to go with image, and add to flickr
• Flickr started reducing the weighting of pics using too many tags
• Make photos public, use loose licensing – can get links from people using your photos – link weight
• You can Geo tag image to be location specific
• Camera’s even now have GPS data that it adds to file in EXIF data
• Share pix with news organizations, like nowpublic.  Can get backlinks from this from people using them for blogs and such
• Post pics on site directly from flickr and hyperlink to groups in flickr
• Post a high quantity of pics
• New site: Yahoo Travel – can upload pics to that now
• Make sure to allow enhanced image search in google webmaster tools.  Users can then tag your images in google image search
• You can add images to businesses in Google Maps
• Integrate with flickr API’s.  Get in on there games and such