LZZR

Image Search: Blessing or Curse?

As you might have noticed from my post about EXIF I am certainly fascinated by the opportunity to squeese out a bit more of SEO not only from the traditional textual content but also from visuals. Every little bit counts and if you can enhance visibility of your site by just another grain, however small it might be it’s nevertheless worth it.
Ever since images appeared on the web webmasters tended to see it as a problem, rather than an advantage for one simple reason - unlike predominantly textual pages which are rarely over 100K images used to be relatively heavy. Not only they slowed down pageloads but also consumed plenty of bandwidth. And this approach seemed to be reasonable enough at the time since even relatively small images could weight several times more whilst large images dozens of times more than the page itself. And you remember the webmaster’s nightmare of not so distant past called hotlinking? Weren’t you just going berserk when some 12 y. o. idiot puts a hotlink to your image from somewhere in Xanga and it starts leeching like crazy eating up megabytes of your daily traffic allowance? Every single trick from referrer check to MOD rewrite we used to fight leechers, it used to be the hottest subject for all webmaster’s forums just a couple of years ago. SEOs too hated images considering them to be useless since search engines can not read images anyways. This negative attitude outlived by far the reasons causing it. Even at the wake of introduction of image search by all major search engines SEOs constantly deranged image search traffic as being not relevant and hurting bandwidth. Some even suggested SEO tricks designed to hide images from Image Search spiders. I am afraid that this is still the predominant attitude in SEO community I am myself guilty of sharing it for quite some time.
Only the recent experience with some of the sites I manage convinced me that this attitude is in most part completely wrong. Let’s look at the most widespread negative arguments and see how relevant they are indeed being applied for sites you own or manage.

1) Images consume too much bandwidth - Dismissed as being completely outdated. Coming from the stone age of the Internet it’s a complete anachronism in our age of Youtube and podcasting. You can’t save a penny economizing on image bandwidth.
2) Hotlinking is bad as another site eats up your bandwidth - Dismissed as greedy and unsociable. Can’t you just allow someone else to use something that belongs to you but costs you nothing? (also see above)
3) Hotlinking is bad because it constitutes copyright infringement - Plausible, but only in part. Most copyright complaints about image theft are completely groundless as most of those complaining just don’t understand that merely resizing an image in Photoshop or other image editor does not produce any copy rights. As for those really holding copy rights over leeched images using proper complaint procedure (see DMCA for details) is the most straightforward and by far the most effective way of dealing with this problem.
4) Image Search Traffic is useless since those searching for images are not interested in products and hence are not likely to become your customers - Plausible but only if you own or manage an online shop. Now, when the Internet is turning from some kind of gigantic department store to a wide arena for social interaction this argument becomes less and less relevant. If your site is based on image content you are more than anybody interested in attracting Image Search traffic since if someone came to your site after seeing one image it’s likely that he or she will enjoy other images from your site too, thus joining your fan base which is a clear blessing. Of course if you are managing a shopping site or most of your monetization is per sale or per action this blessing turns into a curse as logically the type of user coming from Image Search is most likely doing a window shopping rather than the real one. But it flips back to blessing again if you base your strategy on per click monetization like AdSense for example. It’s true that an Image Search surfer is much less focused and less likely to buy online but precisely for this lack of focus this surfer is more likely to click on ads thus increasing your site CTR and overall conversion. I’ve seen it myself - Image Search visitors are a blessing for per click conversion rates. Shall I say that Image Search enhances your site visibility too?

I don’t know if my arguments sound convincing to you, but as far as I am concerned image search traffic is as good as any other kind of traffic if not better in some respects. So now I am going to share some ideas on how to make your site more visible for image search. If you don’t believe your site can benefit from image search traffic, read on anyway, just don’t follow the recommendations I am about to list and do the opposite to this small checklist.
So here is how to make your resource Image Search friendly:

1) The basics available in any SEO textbook for dummies. Give your image a meaningful file name that contains your desired keywords. Put your keywords in alt (which you should do anyway to validate your code accordingly) and more importantly into your image title. Surround your image with keyword-rich textual content.
2) Don’t be afraid of hotlinking! Let every adolescent boy and girl from Facebook or MySpace hotlink to your images. This will do for images the same as normal linking does for text! Don’t worry that these not so SEO-literate young individuals will not put appropriate title or alt while hotlinking: if your image name is filled with keywords anyway this will give Image Robots enough clue. If understandably you don’t want to leave this important issue at the mercy of ruthless teenagers - hotlink yourself! Put it in relevant textual content with keywords in alt and title. The advantage is obvious - it looks inconspicuous, i. e. it does not look like link spam! Spread your hotlinks as wide as possible and be prolific - quick while you can, while hotlinks are not yet as heavily policed as text links with nofollow.
3) You can further enhance searchability of your images by placing a thumbnail that links to your full-size image (NB! not to a page with a full-size image but to the image itself).
4) As a last remedy I may suggest opting in for Google Enhanced image search from your webmaster console - theoretically it should act as a trigger for Google’s Image Search but the only problem I see is that it is not controlled by you.

Although with a benefit of hindsight I can see that my ideas about EXIF are a bit silly but I certainly know about one service that does read EXIF for sure and it is (you guessed it) the beloved Flickr by Yahoo! But this is altogether another story and I promise to write about SEO on Flickr soon.

tags: adsense, dmca, exif, facebook, flickr, myspace, seo, seo on flickr, berserk, copyright, dummies, hot, hot link, hotlinking, image, image search, image theft, keywords, leeching, link, mod rewrite, monetization, nofollow, per action, per click, per sale, searchability, spam, text, textbook, traffic, webmaster, xanga

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Posted by LZZR under Search Engines |