SEO 2.0

One of the more potentially advantageous yet wholly underused areas for optimization is in image search engines. Yet while site owners and merchants are more often seeing their images show up in the regular search results, few have come to understand the benefits of image search optimization. And for professional optimizers, it requires a much broader understanding and specialization over what traditional search allows.

Optimize your Images for the Search Engines - The Players:

Of the “Big 5″ in the contextual image search arena, Google has a huge lead over its competitors. Statistics produced from Hitwise show Google image search to have approximately 72% of all image searches. Google easily holds the largest market share of searches for any search vertical. Its image vertical search even outnumbers the overall TOTAL searches for both Ask and AOL combined.

Adding to the list of Google Image Search advantages is the ‘Enhanced Image Search’ feature, a new feature found in Google’s Webmaster Tools section. It allows site owners additional image optimization capabilities by allowing volunteers to do the optimization for you. Site owners participate in the program by clicking the “enable enhanced image search” link for their website. It then submits the photos found on the owner’s site into its image program. The next step allows participating users to tag the images for the site owner (another variation of Social Network Marketing). Two users will see the same image and attempt to tag the image with keywords; with users receiving points for matching tags. It’s a free way of getting even more keyword signals for Google. It may be seen as a fairly authoritative way for image reference and may be ranking well in Google’s image search results.

“People love participating in the enhanced image search; we’ve had great success with it so far,” said Vanessa Fox, Product Manager for Google.

Other places where image search results appear, and are indexable into general search engines’ contextual results, include:

• Major search engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki)
• Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook)

Image Search Engine Optimization Tips:

1. Image originality. Even if the images you use on your site are not, in themselves, unique. For instance, even if you are an online merchant who receives product images from the manufacturer. You can brand them with your logo, url or trademark. It also allows you as an internet retailer to showcase your product in the best possible light - one that will convert your visitors into customers as well as differentiate your product offering from the competition.
2. Image quality. Why do anything half-ass anyways, right? Start off with good quality pictures, and make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails. Studies show that pictures with good contrast tend to work better. The reason is, when they’re reduced down to the thumbnail size, stronger contrast is needed to better discern image.
3. Image naming. Okay folks. Let’s use some simple common sense. The search engine robots are blind. Treat them like a blind person. Can a blind person make sense of your image if you tell them it is photo “MVC0958-1?” Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. It helps to communicate to searchers that they are viewing the desired graphic image. Treat this as part of your search engine optimization strategy. Optimize the whole page according to it’s focus… So, with that in mind…
4. Optimize the page with the image. This obviously has an effect for page as well as image optimization. Come on now… You need your site to be seen as an authority on your subject. Holistically optimizing the page the image appears on is just as important as optimizing the image itself. It has been proven that optimizing the actual page for contextual search improves graphic images search. Search engines spiders look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine its contextual relevancy. Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings.
5. Image accessibility. It is also important to create an image directory that is accessible to the search engine spiders. Do not robots exclude your graphic images directory or limit search engine access to graphic-image files. Allow your image directory to be freely indexed. One other thing… avoid any type of javascript surrounding your contextual images. It has the possibility of completely hiding the image file from the search engines completely.
6. Image Freshness. Though this has not been proven, try re-uploading your images periodically. One factor the search engines are sure to consider is the “modified date” on your file. Avoid image rot by doing a quarterly maintenance check on your site’s images.

Esoteric Labs’ Optimized Google Image Code:

Not that there is any rocket science being performed here… but consistently structuring your files, page and image code sometimes takes some due diligence. We have all, at one point or another, taken the quick cut-n-paste FrontPage code and slapped it into our pages. Well just like the Tortoise and the Hare, the one who is persistent is the one to win the show. With that in mind, here is how we always consistently optimize our images for our clients. We have had great success.

<div>Page’s Main Keyword<br>
<p><img src=”images/page’s_main_keyword.jpg”
alt=”page’s_main_keyword” />Page’s Main Keyword</p></div>

Top Determined Factors

1. Page’s Main Keyword in same table cell as image.
2. Page’s Main Keyword below or above image in DIV or floating DIV.
3. Page’s Main Keyword in ALT tag.
4. Page’s Main Keyword in image name and image meta file summary.
5. Page’s Main Keyword in same paragraph as image.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Search Engine Optimization, Variety Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.