Tapping Into Image Search – Images aren’t just worth a thousands words. They could be worth thousands of visitors! This session looks at ways to turn your images into traffic, with a special look at Flickr.
Moderator: Matt McGee, Assignment Editor, Search Engine Land
Speakers:
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation
Kaushal Kurapati, Director of Product Management, Yahoo! Search
Peter Linsley, Product Manager, Google Inc.
Matt Siltala, SEO and Owner, Dream Systems Media
Chris Silver Smith, Director of Optimization Strategy, KeyRelevance
NOTES:
Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting Corporation
Topic: Image Search Volume
Showed image if eye track results showing standard top left focus from heat map. The pattern totally changes when you have a blended search result. The image map shows that peoples eyes will be pulled to your image, even when not in the #1 position.
Case Study on VisualDX Health:
- Primary product is pictures of health problems and deceases.
- Site is image centric.
- Site is informative for users to learn about their health problems so they can discuss them with a doctor.
- Eliminated URL parameters to make SEF URLs. Moved image parameters into cookie.
- Eliminated a major duplicate content issue that was hurting the site.
- Made each HTML page represented by one URL.
- Added ALT attribute to all images.
- Traffic to 4,700 uniques a day, image search up to 200 per day within a month or so.
- Up to 12k uniques a day, 3,000 a day on image search within month after.
- Always include the word “image” or “picture” in the alt as people search using that.
- Hundreds of million of images on Flickr.
- Regular feed from Flickr into Y!
- Traffic flows back and forth.
- Private data not indexed.
- Offers no preferential treatment to an images in search.
- Discovered from web pages.
- Crawled, Classified, Indexed.
- Take into consideration the page text and text around the image when ranking.
- Duplicates and Referring pages.
- Ranked based on many signals.
- Focus on the user.
- Think about clarity, size, domain on images, cut, image shape, background, comments, etc.
- Place the image above the fold on the page.
- Use high quality images.
- Name images with keywords.
- Use the proper tags in title, alt, meta, etc. The file name is really important as well; name something related like: keyword-name.jpg.
- Describe the photo in Flickr so there is something for Yahoo and Google to get information about your images from. This will help rankings in related searches.
- Wrap your images within text that is relates. You want to totally surround the image in related text.
- Use image captions as a way to load with images with keywords that you are targeting. WordPress offers a new features to insert a caption when uploading the image.
- Squidoo.
- Within blog posts.
- StumbleUpon.
- Twitter / Twitpic
- Title
- H1
- Captions
- Tagging
- Cross-grouping
- Comments
- Sharing
- Alt Text
- Optimal linking hierarchies
- Date taken and page views displayed
- Interestingness algorithm
- Ford
- Whole Foods
- Nikon as a paid partner
- Make Magazine
- Urban Outfitters
Thanks for the live blogging Andy – This was a fun panel with an amazing group of guys! I appreciated the opportunity to be able to speak on the panel and look forward to more!
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