Conference notes from the "Images & Search Engines" session at Search Engine Strategies New York '07.

Spearkers:
Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GantasticDesigns.com
Linana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360
Chris Silver Smith, Netconcepts (formerly with SuperPages.com)

Panelist:
Justin Denney, Live Image Search

[L-R] Shari Thurow (GantasticDesigns), Linana Evans (Commerce360), Chris Smith (Netconcepts), Justin Denney (Live)

Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director, GantasticDesigns.com

Search engines 1) index text, 2) follow links and 3) measure popularity - this doesn't change when it comes to images.

On-page and off-page (links and linking pages) text should be related.

Alt text is not used to determine relevancy. Example: Art Institute of Chicago has their text in images.

Don't use focus groups to determine whether to use text or text in images. Measure empirically - sometimes an image will perform better than text, sometimes i wont - in one case an "Add to cart" image did 7% better than the same text at getting people to click.

Image search highlights keywords on file name and domain name - use that to your advantage.

Become.com is looking at primary colors and you can narrow a selection based on the colors in the image.

Primary (visible) text on the page is really important.

Search engines will assume .jpgs are photos while .gifs are more likely to be navigational or logos...

Write the file names yourself - have the names make sense to your customers, not techies.

Captions are incredibly useful.

Linana Evans, Search Marketing Manager, Commerce360

Shoppers want to see what they're buying.

Image search is the fastest growing type of search, though it's slowing down a little.

Put images in your feed to boost the effectiveness of your product ads.

She's seen a higher conversion rate when people come from image searches.

Google is leading the way in putting images at the top of web SERPs.

Dominate image search for your brands so negative images don't come up. (Example: RIAA)

Of course, don't block crawling of your image folder.

Chris Silver Smith, Netconcepts (formerly with SuperPages.com)

If you use image sharing sites, you can build good inbound links. Top sites: Flickr, Photobucket, PBase, Webshots, Fotki... You want links back to your web site. Flickr is the best bang for the buck - best PageRank, good keyword text, captions, links back to your site (not nofollowed), users can tag the photos and comment, cross-grouping...

Use good images with good contrast.

Be broad in experimenting with photos that might draw interest.

Write good titles and descriptions, keywords (but not too many keywords).

Be as loose as you can with your licensing.

GeoTag your images - helps people find them.

Cross-link your Flickr pages and the pages on your site.

Yahoo! Travel is also a good place to upload photos of your location.

Google Image Labeler - use it (have it used on your images via Google Webmaster Tools)

Google Maps lets you upload photos of your business

Justin Denney, Live Image Search

Have stable URLs - for both images and pages.

Avoid Javascript and Flash for images you want indexed.

Simple pages are more understandable.

Think about what your image will look like as a thumbnail.

Q&A

Metadata in the image (RDF, etc.) isn't important.

You can upload your company logo in local search.

Tags: Image Search, SEO/SEM, SES-NY
Categories: Image Search