Image Search

Why would you want to optimize for image search and how do you do it? Here are some reasons for doing it:

Image search results are being increasingly used by the search engines in contextual search results to improve usability.

Google is serious about images. In October last year Google added an opt-in to Enhanced Image Search in Webmaster Tools. In conjunction with Image Labeler this allows Google to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

If you search in Google or Yahoo for |pictures of diamond earrings|, |images of mowers|, |hammer image| or something similar, just above the organic listings you will get a row of relevant images. In Yahoo’s case sometimes the images are from Fliker rather than Yahoo image search, for example search Yahoo for |funny pictures|.

All three of the major search engines have a separate image search; Google image search, Yahoo image search and MSN image search.

Image search Statistics from Hitwise http://www.hitwise.com/ show image search is growing at 90% year on year and represents nearly 0.5% of all internet visits.

Traffic from image search can be targeted. It may not convert as well as organic search but it’s free!

Ok so how do you do it? The easiest way to explain is by example and I have created a new image for this page:

We will be optimizing this image for the term |image search| which currently has 5,660,000 results on Google Image Search.

• Put the search term in the page url. In this case it’s http://ift.tt/2tBCNbm
• Put the search term in the page title. In this case it’s <title>Image Search</title>
• Use the search term in close proximity to the image. In this case the search term appears twice in the sentence immediately following the image.
• Make sure the page topic corresponds to the search term. In this case the page topic is definitely image search!
• Make sure the image size is non-standard. In this case it’s 304 x
  203 pixels.
• Make the image in .jpg or .gif format. In this case it’s .jpg
• Name the image with the search term. In this case it’s image-search.jpg
• Use the search term in the alt attribute, the title attribute and make sure that you have included the width and height declarations. In this case we have <img src=”http://ift.tt/2t2faMl; alt=”Image search” title=”Image Search graphic signed by Googlebot” width=”304″ height=”203″ />

I am not suggesting that you do all of the above for every image on your site but if you choose some key pages and optimize the image(s) (or create them specially and then optimize them) on those pages there will be a tangible benefit.

The search engines image databases are not updated all that frequently but when the image above ranks I will post an addendum here.

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Software Submission

Using submission software is a very bad mistake made by a small minority of site owners. Tempted by sales copy that promises to “Submit Your website to more than 1.2 Million Search Engines, Directories and Link pages” they pay for software that is completely unnecessary and in most cases will have a negative effect.

In practice there are only a handful of search engines that people use and all of those have robots that spider the web looking for new pages and sites. There is absolutely no need to submit your pages to these search engines because they will find you quite quickly if you have a link from at least one site that is in their index already. Of course you should have a lot more than one inbound link!

The disadvantages of using such software is that most of the sites they submit to are there only to collect your email address and then make it available to spammers. So when you purchase the software you are in effect paying to be spammed which is not a good way to spend money.

Here is a section of a page from a site that sells this kind of submission software:

Do some people really believe there are 700,000 search engines? Probably not but it doesn’t seem to stop them buying and using the software. Notice that one of the logos is DMOZ which is not a search engine but a directory. Automated DMOZ submission would be a very big mistake and all directory submission should be done by hand as outlined in a previous post Directory Links.

Some submission software claims to auto submit to guestbooks like this example here:

This is even more ludicrous than search engine submission software and should be avoided at all costs. Guestbook spamming doesn’t do anything for your site as far as the search engines are concerned, except perhaps label you as a spammer.

Guestbook spamming has become less of a problem as the number of sites with guestbooks has decreased but has now been replaced by blog spam (posting comments to blog posts that then provided a link to a spammer’s web site). Here is a section of a page from a site that sells blog link generating software:

Of course it doesn’t work because current blog software has methods of preventing blog spam such as registration and posting with captcha (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”). Captcha is used on this blog. Even if the blog spammer breaks through the barriers and manages to post their spam most blogs apply the nofollow attribute to urls in comments, so it really is a complete waste of effort.

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Hidden Text (Revisited)

Just over a year ago I posted on the dangers of hidden text and concluded with the advice “…don’t use hidden text to try to improve your rankings“.

Here is a practical example of what may happen if you do.

Yesterday John Frost who runs the very popular Disney Blog posted that his blog had been delisted from the Google index and sure enough it had:

Such is the power of popular blogs that within a couple of hours of John’s plea for help their was an explanation and a resolution from none other than Google Engineer and spam fighter in chief, Matt Cutts. He explains in a diplomatic and friendly comment that hidden text was responsible for the ban. Specifically this page code:

<h2 id=”banner-description”>Informing Disney Fans the World Over with the latest news and updates from all Disney companies, divisions, and related stories. Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruises, Disney Animation, Pixar, ESPN, and more are covered in as much detail as I can muster.</h2>

With this in the external CSS file:

#banner-description
{
overflow: hidden;
width: 0;
height: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
text-indent: -1000em;
}

As it happens this appears to be a generic Typepad problem in that when you set up a Typepad blog you are asked to enter a Weblog description which ends up being hidden by the CSS. However after Matt had pointed it out and John had removed the text, Matt helpfully submitted a reinclusion request.

Matt has gone off to talk to Six Apart the Typepad developers and The Disney Blog will be back in the index sometime next week.

The moral of the story is still the same – don’t use hidden text to try to improve your rankings.

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What are keywords?

Keywords or keyphrases are the search terms that a user types into a search engine text box in order to find information relevant to their search. For example if you search Google for |chess| you will see something like this:

This is called the Search Engine Result Page or SERP and Google tries to put the most relevant result first, then the next and so on. What you see is the top ten results out of, (in this case) over 24 million pages ranked in order of relevance.

Google can’t know if the user is looking for something more specific like for example; chess sets, chess clubs or the rules of chess, so the results will be a broad range of pages related to chess in some way.

A user seeking a chess club in Chicago is more likely to search for |chess club chicago| in which case they would see something like this:

Notice how for this more specific search the number of candidate pages has gone down from over 24 million to around 1.8 million. As Google says “Choosing the right search terms is the key to finding the information you need”.

The obvious corollary for site owners is that choosing the right keywords to optimize for is the key to maximising the number of visitors and conversions (the percentage of visitors who take a desired action like buy a product or subscribe to a newsletter). In general the higher you are in the SERPs the more visitors you will have and the more specific the keywords the higher the conversion.

Users search in different ways with different words and site owners need to know what these keywords and phrases are for their particular business.

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Keyword Research

Keyword research enables site owners to choose keywords when constructing and optimizing a website (page). Keyword research is also extensively used to manage PPC advertising campaigns or if you are looking to research and identify profitable niche markets.

When performing keyword research for constructing and optimizing a website (page) you are looking to select search terms that will reach your target audience. One of the common mistakes made by some SEOs is to avoid choosing keywords that are very competitive. Searchers tend to use a lot modifiers when they search and the more competitive the search term the more likely they are to use a modifier. Removing the possibility of ranking well for these modified searches is not a good idea. Competition can be a factor in deciding how to target a specific search term but you should never ignore a search term simply because you believe it is too competitive.

There are two basic tools for the site owner:

1. Digital Point Solutions Keyword Suggestion Tool

Digital Point’s online keyword tool compares Overture and WordTracker data side by side. It is free, quick and easy to use although it lacks WordTracker’s more advanced features. Here is a partial screen shot.

2. Google Adwords Keyword Tool

You will need an AdWords account to use Google Adwords Keyword Tool but signing up is easy and well worth it just to use the tool. Although primarily designed for AdWords it is also ideal for use as a simple keyword suggestion tool. The big advantage is of course that it is using the latest Google data and you can find and select keywords based on this data. You can create keywords from a url (i.e. one page), a whole site, a keyword(s) that you enter or for AdWords users the most relevant terms in your account. The results are shown by relevance but can be ordered by Advertiser Competition or Search Volume on a scale of 1 to 5. You can also download the results as a .csv (for excel) file which makes it easy to compile master lists.

Here is a partial screen shot of a list from a keyword.

Here is a partial screen shot of a list from a url.

Most site owners will find the above tools sufficient for their needs but if you want to investigate other tools there are basically two kinds, keyword analytical tools and subscription based tools. Here are some examples with a link to the product and a link to a review of the product.

Keyword Analytical Tools:

• Keyword Analyzer Review
• The Keyword Bible Review
• The Dowser Review

Subscription based:

• WordTracker Review
• Keyword Discovery Review
• Keyword Intelligence Review

A word of caution though if you try these tools. The major search engines (Google,Yahoo and MSN) do not make their raw data available to anyone so these products have to obtain data from somewhere else. For example WordTracker uses data from the Metacrawler and Dogpile metacrawlers which represents a very small and not very representative sample of searches. Not only that but in order to estimate figures like the predicted number of searches for a keyword an extrapolation has to be made. In WordTracker’s case they assume Metacrawler and Dogpile account for 0.86% of all search engine queries (a dubious statistic in itself) and scale up the numbers in their database accordingly. This has the effect of compounding any errors in the original dataset and at the very least means that these derived numbers should not be taken too seriously.

A most important source of keywords that is often overlooked is your server logs. Regularly mine your server log data to find the search terms people are actually using to find your site and use these terms to construct new pages or modify existing ones. You can read more about this process in these two posts Long Tail Search and Long Tail Search Tool.

March 1st, 2016 Wordtracker have introduced a free keyword suggestion tool that will generate up to 100 related keywords.

May 11, 2016 Wordze is a new subscription based tool which has some interesting features.

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G profile video

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKKraAibgkEjOqvxkC2Vw0A

Short case study showing some rankings & traffic.

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Search Engine Friendly Urls

It is important to have search engine friendly urls if you want your pages spidered and indexed by the search engines but what does having search engine friendly urls actually mean? Let’s take a look at what the three major search engines say about urls:

Google has three things to say on the subject in its Webmaster Guidelines:

1. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

2. Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

3. Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

Yahoo in their Search Indexing FAQ say:

Do you index dynamically generated pages (e.g., asp, .shtml, PHP, “?”, etc.)?

Yahoo! does index dynamic pages, but for page discovery, our crawler mostly follows static links. We recommend you avoid using dynamically generated links except in directories that are not intended to be crawled/indexed (e.g., those should have a /robots.txt exclusion).

MSN’s Guidelines for successful indexing say:

Keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated or frequently changed URLs are difficult to use as link destinations. For example, the URL http://ift.tt/1iUlcEq is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions.

The message is clear, static urls are better than dynamic but if you have a dynamic site the urls must be as simple as possible, with only one or two query strings and no session IDs.

A url that might look like this:

http://ift.tt/2ntCivH

Should preferably look like this:

http://ift.tt/2n115vH

How you achieve this depends on whether you are starting out with a new site or have an established site with existing complex urls.

If it is a new site then search engine friendly urls must be built into the design criteria. How this will be done depends on the programming language. For example if you planned to use PHP then you might make use of the PATH_INFO variable or if you use ASP.NET then you could modify the Global.asax file.

If you plan to use a content management system (CMS) then make sure that it generates search engine friendly urls out of the box. The Content Management Comparison Tool has a check box for ‘Friendly URLs’ if you are researching CMS tools.

A completely different approach (not approved of by geeks but worth consideration if you are designing your own site as a non-professional) is to create static HTML web pages from a database or spreadsheets but not in real-time. WebMerge for example works with any database or spreadsheet that can export in tabular format such as FileMaker Pro, Microsoft Access, and AppleWorks. Using HTML template pages WebMerge makes a new HTML page from the data in each record of the exported file. It can also create index pages with links to other pages and generated pages can be hosted without the need for a database.

If it is an existing site then problematic urls can be converted to simple urls in real-time. If you are on an Apache server then you can use mod_rewrite to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. This requires knowledge of regular expressions which can be rather daunting if you are not a programmer. Fortunately there is an abundance of mod_rewrite expertise at RentACoder if you get stuck. If you are on Internet Information Server (IIS) then you can use something like ISAPI_Rewrite to rewrite your urls which also requires knowledge of regular expressions.

What ever your solution you should try to incorporate your keywords in the urls and only ever use hyphens, never an underscore or space.

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