Peter Linsley—Google
First up Peter Linsley of Google ran through some of the concepts behind Google images and also factors that may influence ranking of images on Google which included some of the following:
The text around the image and the kind of words contained is also a factor taken into account by Google.
Also placement of image—and whether it is above the fold
Peter also suggested that other dynamic features were in play. For example can a user comment on the image via a comments box? Or whether the image could be rated somehow.
Kaushal Kurapati—Yahoo
Kaushal Kurapati of Yahoo followed Peter Linsley’s presentation with the Yahoo perspective. Images are the 2nd biggest Y! Search property and are an important part of search for Yahoo. There are billions of web images being crawled by Yahoo when you add up images on Flickr and Y! Properties.
Kaushal informed the audience that unlike website search people’s search behaviour was different for images and they could be very thorough with their searching. People can browse deep to find images—sometimes 30 pages deep to find a particular image.
Similar to Google basic SEO matters with Yahoo image search. Titles, anchor text and alt text can all play a part in the ranking process as well as timestamps too, as freshness is an important factor for Yahoo when it comes to ranking images.
Matt Siltala—Dream Systems Media
Matt’s presentation included some useful tips for attendees. Firstly to name images and use related keywords. Then as Kaushal suggested to use tags for an image, in particular the title and alt tag. Beyond this building links to and from the image was seen as a useful exercise. Finally text was important and Matt suggested including related text around the image file itself. As Google had suggested that the number of referring websites using a particular image was taken into account by Google Matt recommended a list of places to share images.
Flickr
Picasa
Photobucket
Slideshare
Slide
Fotki
Smugmug
Imageshack
Dropshots
Webshots
Chris Silver Smith—Key Relevance
In his presentation Eric informed the audience that 15% of all searches may take place in image searches, but competition is much lower in volume—so traffic opportunities can be good by optimising images for search. Users eyes are typically attracted to the top left (golden triangle theory), however when image searches was added to the Google SERPs it totally changed the way people looked and canned the pages, and this is because images attracted a lot of attention.
Eric provided some useful tips:
Use the word ‘pic’ or ‘picture’ or ‘photo’ in alt attribute
Enable enhanced image search in webmaster tools—community can tag the images (so if you have quality this option works). Google Safe Search can pose a problem—as sometimes it can limit the appearance of some images that are actually safe.
Eric talked through an example of one website he worked on that wanted to show medical photos of skin diseases, but at the time some skin diseases would get tagged by Google as adult and not shown on safe search (even though they were actually safe). However the solution to this is to appeal by reporting the problem to Google. When doing so his tip was to state the problem clearly, don’t complain, and make sure the site is clean.
No comments:
Post a Comment