LZZR

August 2, 2006

Image search plus EXIF could be another traffic booster

There is something in SEO that tends to be grossly overlooked most of the time, namely something that might be called image search optimisation. Not only it is so because image search as such had been rolled out full-scale less than to years ago. Admittedly at first seeing my sites ranking well on image search in Yahoo and Google was pretty annoying. Having done pretty tough and thorough text optimisation of all my sites I obviously tried to squeeze the last drop from images too (meaningfull filenames, alts and titles, you know the routine…). As a result I ended up having sites overoptimised for image crawlers. At first I anticipated a huge bandwidth loss as leechers sprung up in their thousands. As it turned out to be leechers have much shorter life span and we are here for good so I begun to realise that eing at the top of image search isn’t so bad after all as even considering collateral damage leecher do to the bandwidth my sites begun to profit from increasing traffic and hopefully from hot links as well (I suppose SE might count hotlinked image as a kind of positive vote for a site rather than a negative one).
Hence, after thinking for a while I decided to look for ways of optimising websites specifically for image crawlers. To my infinite disappointment it turned out to be that a well optimised site already has everything and no further optimisation is possible.
Are we to stop here and surrender? Although it is a bit of common knowledge that SE robots don’t read images and as we can clearly see in their results count only the textual neighbourhood trying to determine the relevance of a group of images to a textual search, could it be that they actually take a sneak peek inside an image file? Although as this guy and many others suggest they do not, but what if secretly they already do look into Exif in JPEG? Can we help them adding some suggestions inside the very image and if this helps it might even affect the relevancy of the whole website, not just a single image.
Yes, you are right, I am talking about a possibility of an image-based keyword stuffing!
Seems like a wilde idea but I am off to set an experiment placing two identical images, one with an empty and the other one with a keyword rich content :-).