Tips in Image Search in the SEO Picture

One of the major trends that emerged from SES San Jose is the increasingly important role of image search. This article will talk a bit about how and why it's growing, and strategies for optimizing your web site to receive this type of traffic.

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., August 20-23, 2007.

First let's start with a few data points that illustrate why image search is increasing in importance:

1. In his keynote interview with Chris Sherman on Tuesday morning, Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, said that 50 percent of the results they provide on Ask3D do not come from traditional web results. Note that my own examination of this shows that there are still 10 blue links, but there are also image results, news results, and other relevant data provided in addition.

2. In the Image Search session, Shari Thurow stated that 15 percent to 16 percent of web searches are for images. This is just a stunning number!

3. Shari Thurow also offered up the data point that usability testing shows that users are more likely to click on an image link than a text link. As experienced SEOs know that means you lost the anchor text opportunity with that link, but you can easily address that by putting the pretty image links up top, and having a general purpose menu in the footer of your page using text links.

4. From an examination of sites I monitor, Google Image Search has become a steadily more important referrer, and often is one of the top 5 referrers. This is true even on sites that are not really that image-centric.

One of the major things that is driving this is the advent of universal/federated/blended search results. The integration of images into the web search results in a more integral way is providing greatly increased access to the available image data. In addition, more and more people are becoming aware of just how rich image search has become. People are getting high quality results, so conducting an image search becomes a natural reaction of more searchers when the need arises.
Image Search Optimization

So now that we know that image search represents a significant opportunity, I will now draw on the rest of my SES San Jose 2007 notes related to image search and lay out the basics of image search optimization.

As an obvious first step, figure out how images can and should fit into the user experience on your site. This is a non-trivial step. Then, determine how and where you can obtain original images for your site. Image search engines don't like duplicate content any more than web search engines, so you need to obtain your own original images. Once you have this in place, here are the major steps you can take to optimize for image search engines:

1. Use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is a critical step, as it is the one best opportunities you have to unambiguously label the image. Bear in mind that there is a huge amount of search volume that includes words like: photo, picture, image, pics, pix, or locations. Regarding the locations, if your image is a picture of a physical location, include some location information in the alt tag attribute.

2. Note that the title tag attribute is usually ignored. Don't waste your time on it.

3. Pick a logical file name, that reinforces the keywords. Using hyphens in the file name to isolate the words in the keyword is an OK to thing, just try not to exceed two hyphens. Do not use underscores as a word separator.

4. Use a descriptive file name, in a similar fashion to the alt tag attribute.

5. Pay attention to the file extension too. For example, if the image search engine sees a ".jpg" (JPEG) file extension, it's going to assume that the file is a photo.

6. Basic web page optimization applies too. For example:
* The title tag of the web page
* The text nearby the image
* The overall theme of the content of the page
* The overall theme of the site (or section of the site)

7. Also important is to get links to the page with the image on it. This could become an entire link building discussion in itself, but one simple way to do this it to post the pages with images on them to del.icio.us.

8. Avoid duplicate content on your site. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don't want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don't want indexed (most likely this would be the thumbnail or the full size image).

A couple of other interesting points emerges from the discussion. One of these was brought up by Liana Evans, which was that reputation management issues apply to image search as much as it does to web search. You should be aware of what pictures are out there of you, your brand, or your company, and you should actively work on making sure that the most common results that come up are pictures that fit the image you are trying to create.

In addition, image theft is a real issue, and is hard to stop. One thing you can do is to place some text in the image, such as "photo by ..." of "image by ...". While this does not stop photo theft altogether, it does require the person taking the image to do some editing to the image before they can use it.

In summary, image search can bring great results for your business. Of course, you want to make sure that the traffic you get is relevant to your site, and that those visitors might ultimately do what you want them to do on your site. With that in mind, step back and take a look at how optimizing for image search might fit into your overall web strategy.

Eric Enge is the president of Stone Temple Consulting, an SEO consultancy outside of Boston. Eric is also co-founder of Moving Traffic Inc., the publisher of City Town Info and Custom Search Guide.

6 Simple Steps To Image Optimization

With the advent of Google Universal Search, Ask 3D and other "blended" search services, images will increasingly be appearing in search results.

If you're not optimizing images on your web site, you're missing out on capturing some of this increasingly valuable real-estate. Not sure how to optimize images for search engines? Today's Search Illustrated shows you how to do it simply and quickly:

19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images

One way to get more search engine traffic is to optimize your website for Google Image Search, a tool which allows users to easily find images by typing in specific search terms, phrases and keywords.

Many people utilize Google Image search to find images for a wide variety of topics, which can range from pictures of cars to celebrities and furniture.

Images can not only make your website visually attractive: they can help you to gain more daily search engine traffic.

Highly relevant image results show up at the top of Google’s search results page when one searches for specific topics. Getting listed in this prime position can possibly send a great deal of traffic to your website.

Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization

Google Image Search optimization is not a difficult process and only requires that you pay attention to how you label and use your images within the regular framework of your website. A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors such as the inclusion of relevant keywords in the content, title and meta tags.

All of the articles I’ve read on the topic of Google Images optimization seem to be in common agreement and they offer similar suggestions, although a few of them do highlight some different methods of utilizing Google Image Search.

19 Ways to Get More Traffic Using Google Image Search

I’ve made a full list of all the methods I’ve come across so that all of you can have an accessible reference point, should you decide to use Google Images as a method to drive more traffic to your website.

Also added are a few points of my own, specifically dealing with how targeting specific image topics and integrating them within your webpages can help to attract a great deal more traffic through Google images.

Depending on your niche and images used, you’ll be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. I highly recommending putting at least a few of these points into practice on your own website.

Here is the list of Google image optimization tips in full:

1. Insert keywords into your Alt Text.

This is the most important part of image optimization and you should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image and your webpage. The alt text should be inserted in the code for your image file.

Here’s an example: Alt description goes here">

2. Name your Images with Descriptive Titles.

If you have an image of Lindsay Lohan, you could use the term ‘lindsay-lohan.jpg’ to name your image, instead of simply going with the original file name which could be something like ‘b473.jpg’. I usually name my images exactly the same way as my alt text.

3. Use relevant text around your images.

It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find that a short description of 20+ characters beneath every image. You’ll probably notice that the keyword is listed in bold as well.

4. Use Adsense to assess overall content relevance.

Insert an Adsense unit on the page where your googe images are placed and see what type of Adsense ads show up. This will tell you how Google thinks the overall theme of what your page is about.

Change your content until the Adsense units reflect the keywords you want to target. In my opinion, this is not only applies to Google images but is a generally helpful method as it improves your overall latent semantic indexing score and makes your site appear more relevant to Google for targeted key phrases or words.

5. Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.

This should already be part of your overall optimization strategy and it purportedly helps your site to rank better in image searches as well. Like the use of Adsense for testing, paying attention to this point will help you to have better visibility in Google’s main search engine as well.

6. Use anchor text keywords in links to images.

When you link to a specific image, use keywords instead of a generic phrase. For example, instead of using “See here” or “Click for Full Size“, try something like “Lindsay Lohan Picture” or “Lindsay Lohan in Rehab“.

7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it might be helpful to tag your images using internal tagging functions or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it to rank better. If you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use the appropriate keyword tags as well.

8. Use Broad Categories of Images to Get a Larger Audience

If you’re running a gadget website, you don’t have to only upload pictures of gadgets. Try upload pictures of web 2.0 sites, web applications and pictures of items related to your gadgets. For example, you can upload pictures of living rooms instead, if the gadget was designed to complement residential space.

9. Make Your Image folder accessible to search engines

Ensure that your robots.txt file does not limit search engines from accessing your image files. This is essential if you want your images to be ranked on Google Image Search. Try not to use javascript links on image files as well as it will limit search engine access as well.

10. Re-upload your pictures to maintain search freshness

If you have a picture that focuses on highly popular keywords, you can try to remove and re-upload another version of your image because freshness might affect relevancy and may rejuvenate your ranking on the Google Image Search engine.

11. Make your Google Images Standards-compliant.

One way of making your images fully standards complaint requires you to include not only the alt tag but also the width, height and title tag for the image as well. Here’s an example of a fully compliant image reference you can follow.

12. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Central.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools and click on the Diagnostic tab on the menu bar. After which, select enhanced image search on the left sidebar and click on the checkbox to opt into image search for your website. This can only be done after you verify your website with Google so do that before proceeding further.

13. Try out Google Image Labeler.

Apparently, the Google Image Labeler is some sort of a online game which allows you and others to write tags for images that show up. These tags are then taken into consideration and may influence the Google Image search results.

14. Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages

By adding a piece of javascript code, you can prevent your images from being framed when users click on the image within Google Image Search. Visitors will not see the Google image frame but the full site and this may encourage more pageviews for your site as well. This practice may not entirely be endorsed by Google so try at your own risk.

15. HotLink Images from Google Search

This involves going to Google Image Search and to do a search query for the image you want. Visit the original webpage and copy the image location to hotlink it on your own website. This helps your website to show up high among the image search ranks. For an example, check out these search results for Jessica Alba (slightly NSFW).

Most of the images in the top row are hotlinked and actually rank better than the original image source. You should probably note that hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters because it leeches their bandwidth, not to mention that you might be violating copyrights as well.

An alternative method of hotlinking is to hotlink Google’s cache itself. This short tutorial gives clear indication of how to do it but this method only allows you to use thumbnails, not to mention that some webmasters have reported seeing no results after trying this method.

16. Use Image Sizing to Target a Search Term.

The size of your image may determine the amount of visits you receive from Google Image Search. Some people use Google Image to search for wallpapers and if you’re targeting a specific keyword, try creating it in the form of a wallpaper or in the form of an icon, depending on how much competition there is for the specific image.

17. Use Images about ‘Hot’ Topics.

One easy way to get more visitors from Google images involves the deliberate use of images to catch visitors who are searching for ‘hot’ topics, some of which can be easily found through the use of Google Trends. For example, screenshots of popular ongoing TV shows could be integrated in some way in some webpages. Note that for maximum effect, your content should be relevant to the image used as well.

18. Create a separate page and link to the page and image

This process involves adding an optimized page webpage on your website along and link the image to that specific page which visitors can access via the ‘back’ anchor on the new page whenever they find your page through Google Image Search.

I have not personally tried this but some have claimed that it helps both the regular search rank as well as the Image Search rank. See this page for the method in full.

19. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed

An important part of Google Image Search optimization is to monitor how many images on your website are indexed by Google Image Search to see if you are taking the right steps to optimize your images.

The easiest way to do this is to use a site search operator. For example, here is a list of images indexed on Boing Boing. Simply change boingboing.net to your url: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:boingboing.net

Converting Google Image Search Visitors

Getting traffic from Google Image Search is very nice but you’ll need some way of converting them into a customer or future reader. This can be quite difficult because visitors are likely to click away if after they find the image.

Here are some conversion tactics you can use:

• Place your image on a webpage with highly relevant content
• Link to other relevant webpages and image galleries
• Promote a special offer related to the product image that you’ve used
• Allow users to copy the image and paste it on their website (try this script)
• Include call to actions at the start and end of webpages

Try Experimenting with Google Image Search..

I’ve recently gotten a decent number of hits for a image which was experiencing seasonal surge in search queries for a specific term and I’m sure that the list of tips above will help you to get some extra traffic from Google Images as well.

You can start by first trying out a few images in your webpages or new blog posts to see if you actually get some traffic from it. Remember to monitor traffic through your stats package and tweak for optimum results.

Most Effictive ways to Increase Targeted Traffic to Your Blog

The key to make money from your website/blog is to find out how your can increase unique visitors. The more people that visit your page, more the money you make. So, basically making money online revolves around how to increase unique visitors.

Tip 1 - Writing articles and submits them to article directories

The most successful technique is to write articles and submit them to article directories. One of the best ways to get free targeted traffic around so don't dismiss it. There is no shortage of online directories which accepts quality original articles. This is for free and you don't have to pay them any subscription or membership fee. Don't forget when write an article to focus with the niche that your Blog is related with. And don't forget, more articles you write and submit to article directories, more target traffic you get.

And keep in mind that the volume of blog posts you do can have a large impact on the potential traffic you get not only today but in the future as well.


Tip 2 - Free Ebook Traffic

Create a free ebook or report that's filled with valuable information that people will pass around and share. This is called viral marketing because it spreads all over the Internet quickly like a virus.

Your ebook doesn't have to be long, it can have anywhere between 15 to 50 pages to be considered valuable to people. You can fill your ebook with articles that you've written or pick a topic and create some valuable information relating to your website. If you don't enjoy writing you can always hire someone to ghostwrite the ebook.

Make sure you have links throughout the ebook back to your website and that you encourage people to distribute it freely.


Tip 3 - Use Forums

If you want to increase targeted traffic, you can begin participating in forums on the Internet. Choose forums where people will be talking about something relevant to your industry or product. For example, if you sell wedding invitations, go to a wedding planning forum. Each time you post make sure to include a link back to your site. Or recommend the site to others while you're disguised as an ordinary user.

Another cheap and efficient technique to increase the website traffic is to join forums and communities on the internet. This does not involve any costs at all, but you are expected to spend some time online. Join the forums and communities that are related to your website niche. This creates an opportunity for free advertising. You can give your expert opinion and share knowledge on the topics and about your website/blog to create more awareness.


Tip 4 - Use Social Marketing

Social bookmarking is a great way to create traffic to your blog, as well as to create search engine bait for potential search engine traffic. And the other thing is social bookmarking is extremely easy to do, especially if you have the right plug-ins and are using a Word Press blog.

Join all of the social marketing sites you can get your hands on then talk about the site and provide links back to the site as much as you want. Try to join friends' lists in which you can reach your targeted audience.

If you are using another platform such as Blogger you can bookmark a multiple directories utilizing services such as Onlywire. They make it possible for you to quickly bookmark over 20 directories with one click.


Tip 5 - Use Social Network

Using social network like MySpace.com and Facebook.com to advertise your website/blog has become a new way to increase your traffic. This sites is mainly a "people meeting" site but you can list your website/blog and create friendships with thousands of people in a very short time.

You simply need to mention your website/blog URL when you send a message to the community bulletin board. This can create a tremendous flood of traffic to your website as there are more than 200 millions subscribers to them.

other sites:
Digg
del.icio.us
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Netscape
Magnolia
YouTube


Tip 6 - Free Stuff

If you're interested in finding a way to increase targeted traffic to your site, one way is to make something available for free.


Tip 7 - SEO Optimization

Another good way to increase targeted traffic is through SEO optimization. By focusing on some keywords that would be relevant to your targeted audience, you can land a better spot in the search engine rankings and reach a larger number of these individuals.


Tip 8 - Use Ping-0-Matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish: http://www.pingomatic.com

Tip 9 - Always Comment on other blogs.

Tip 10 - Make a video and brand it with your blog’s address

Tip 11 - Answer questions on Yahoo Answers and make sure you write your url blog in your answer.


Just focus on the Tips and you will see fantastic results for your blog, and huge targeted traffic.