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Image Search; Images Are Content Too!It was Ken's daughter Nori and her Anguilla-Beaches.com Web site that alerted us to the power of Google's Image Search feature in generating traffic. After checking her log files it became apparent just how much traffic Google was generating. In fact, Nori's second leading referrer was... http://images.google.com/imgres Her top-referring one was... http://www.google.com/search Her fifth leading referrer was... http://images.google.com/imgres Her tenth was... http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images/view (also powered by Google) And she had a whole bunch of other image referrers further down, too, URLs like... http://pictures.ask.com/redir ... and image URLs from every major country-version of Google, and other engines. All in all, it added up to a whole bunch of traffic from these image searches, something we had never considered. Anyway, that triggered some database mining by our SBI! techs across the thousands of SBI! sites, as well as a little good-old-fashioned research in Google's Image section. We found that optimizing for Image Search is fairly simple. Still, no single parameter is ever absolute -- search is just too multi-factorial for that. These factors are the important ones -- if you get them right, they'll all add up to pretty good results. Here's what helps you get found during an image search... SIDEBAR: If your site lends itself well to images, then keep reading. For example, a site about wildlife photography or travel sites. But if your site is on quantum physics, the number of people doing image searches is likely pretty small and you can skip this article. 1) Keyword should be in the image's file name (exact keyword is best, dashes between each word in a multi-word keyword, but underscore and dots are OK, too). Google will also count stemmed versions of word(s) in your keyword. Even this is not absolute -- the Keyword does not absolutely have to appear in the image file name to get onto Page 1! 2) Keyword in alt tag? Not as important as you might think. Many of Nori's earlier pages, built with the block-by-block builder, had no alt tags and yet score well for image search. Still, there is a correlation. So she has started using them gently and appropriately -- it's key to remember to never do anything just to get found. Keep it real or you'll get burned, and you'll deserve it, too. 3) Keyword should appear in text near the image, either in a headline (if appropriate) or as a (bold) text label directly adjacent to image, or in the body text as close as possible. Again, keep it real and don't go overboard -- one use of the keyword somewhere near the image is fine. 4) Google's usual on-page and off-page algorithms and PR do count, too, although it seems not as heavily weighted for images. That's likely because an image is more cut and dry -- it's either on the page, or it's not. The "bigger picture" of inbound links and other off-page criteria are not as important in image search. 5) "Entire site relevance analysis" is of less importance than on-page criteria and the image itself, same reason. As a quick example to see what I mean, do a search for "anguilla beaches" (no quotes) after you first click on Google's "Images" tab . Examine each result -- Nori has done no optimization for image searches since this was a recent, accidental finding by her. Now do a search for "anguilla" in the Images section -- Nori's site is found on the 2nd page, not bad for such a poor effort (not criticizing here, it just has not been "image-optimized"). After all, she has not put up an image with the perfect filename ("anguilla.jpg"), with an alt tag, etc. That is now going to be a priority since "anguilla" is such a popular search term and since it would seem to be easy to score on page one (since her map was good enough to score on page two despite not getting all the factors right). Bottom line... Yes, images are content, too. But a few caveats... 1) Your site may not lend itself to people searching for photos. If not, don't worry about it. For many information-based SBI! sites, image-searching is a near-zero contributor to traffic. So while it's not a bad idea to format any images you do include on your Web site in the manner outlined above (think 80% of the results with 20% of the effort!), don't spend too much time on it. 2) Ask yourself if folks would search for images of your theme for the right reasons. If it's because they have a genuine interest in the theme, good! If it's because they want to steal images, it may not be the best idea. But generally, I can't think of many such "bad" scenarios. 3) Finally, being found by a Google image search is less valuable than by a text search since... i) Google displays you in a frameset after a visitor clicks on your image actually found on the results page. That means they must click ONE MORE TIME to actually visit your site itself. And we all know what each required click means. ii) More precise, targeted searches will be performed on the Google Web search, and therefore are more likely to turn up your particular business. After all, people performing image searches are not generally searching for precise information, or for the same reasons. Still, it is how the publisher of Anguilla Life magazine first found Nori! "So you never know when good things can happen." iii) General searches tend to work well for image searches. After all, if you need a picture of a laptop, its unlikely you'll search for anything other than "laptop". That means it's much harder to drive extremely targeted traffic from an image search. Still, every bit helps. :-) SIDEBAR: I asked Paul Crane, SBI!'s Product Manager to perform some image searches and provide us with his insights. Paul has not had a single image referral! Why not? Well, his SBI! site, diet-supplement-review.com, is just not the kind of theme that would invite image searches. Here's what he said... i) I suspect image searches tend to lend themselves to more general searches simply because.... they work! Want to find pictures of horses on Google? Type in "horses", and off you go. Prefer a "quarter horse"? Type it in, and you're good to go. Looking for a picture of a laptop computer? "Laptop" will do it. You wouldn't type in "compare laptops" or "best cheap dell laptop" or "horse training" -- the type of keyword you would need to use on any SE to deliver the sort of results you want. So image search works best if you have a very specific, esoteric subject or theme, or one that is tied intrinsically to your pictures. The interest will tend to be more generic than laser-specific text search. Still, traffic is traffic, especially if it doesn't require any extra work to target. These days, there's so many ways to monetize your site, it's easy to turn any visitor into income. For example... A visitor arrives at your site specifically as a result of an image search. On that same page as the image she just happens to see and click on a Google Adsense ad... Click-KaChing! Incidentally, performing more specific, targeted keyword searches on the image segment of Google didn't seem to change the results pages dramatically for me. I suspect that's most people name image files simply -- i.e. they'll label it "laptop.gif", and not "best-cheap-dell-laptop.gif." ii) The sites that come up in the top 10 for extremely general searches like "laptop", "horses", and so on, do not even rank when the same search is performed on a Google Web search. That tells me that it's a lot easier to score for images than text. So if your site does lend itself to images, grab some easy traffic now. The best bet for any information-rich site?... Continue to create new content as usual -- that's your best strategy for attracting targeted, free traffic from the SEs. You will accomplish much more by creating new content than you will by spontaneously adding images to a site that doesn't require them. Of course, every last bit of traffic does count, so always format new image properly. On the other hand, SBI! sites that do feature images extensively, like... http://www.wildlife-pictures-online.com/ and... http://www.best-horse-photos.com/ ... are prime candidates for following the simple guidelines above to get some "easy traffic." Bottom line? Don't leave easy traffic on the table. Images are content, too... on certain kinds of sites. If your site fits that bill, optimize all images to be found by following the above guidelines. SIDEBAR: Not sure? Go to your Traffic Stats and check your referrers. If you don't see any image referrers, odds are your site is not appropriate. If you are getting some traffic through image searches, you probably could/should be getting quite a bit more. Final advice? If your site is right for image search, you might want to make sure you've got your Top 5 keywords well optimized for image search, one keyword per image on each page that focuses on the respective keyword. It's much simpler than doing text optimization -- just follow the above guidelines. After that, over the following weeks, as you modify an existing page, optimize for image search, too. But unless you see some powerful potential for your site, don't turn this into a big project that wastes hours going through your entire site optimizing for every page. After all... Words still rule. :-)
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