Optimizing Images for Search Engines, Social Media, and your Readers

People do not just search for web pages; they also search for certain images. By optimizing your images, you can enhance the entirely new channel of the visitors to your site. Yes, it is true that the search engines are not smart enough to decrypt an image and tell exactly what it is, like human eye can. But you can assist search engine to figure out what keywords your images are related too. So, we will discuss in the article as how the images can be optimized for the best perception by the Search Engines, Social Media Sites, and People.

Image search, by one definition, is query results, accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users’ search queries. Such information can be generated and submitted by the image creator, by site owner where the image resides, or by 3rd party reviewers.
Places where image search results appear, and are indexable into general search engines’ contextual results, include:

• Major search engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
  
• Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki, ShareAPick)
  
• Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook, Flyxia, YouSayToo)

The panel, consisting of both image search specialists and search engine product managers, concurred that image search is the fastest growing vertical in the search arena today. Statistics from Hitwise show it to achieve 90% growth year after year, with over 360,000,000 searches per month across the top search engines: Google, Yahoo!, Ask, MSN, and AOL. All in the "Big 5" have a search vertical dedicated specifically to image results, with 3 of them (Google, Yahoo!, MSN) integrating images into some contextual search results.

The recommendations for the images optimization in relation to the main optimization focus are as follows.


Optimize your images for search engines:

• Keywords in alt text, text around the image, image name, page title. Give meaningful names to your images. For example, GreenToyotaCamry.jpg is better than image1.jpg. Add long description tags to your images. For example: longdesc=”1998 green Toyota Camry driving down the highway”. In addition to a long description, an alt tag should be used as a short description. For example: alt=”Toyota Camry”
  
• Preferred image formatting for photos is JPG, and for other graphic image types - GIF. Search engines are going to interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image with 256 colors, and JPGs as photos (because photos have millions of colors).
  
• Separate SE accessible image folder.
  
• Image freshness. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords, try experimenting with re-uploading your pix, since image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and might affect relevancy.
  
• Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.
  
• Reasonable image file size. But note that the bigger images usually have a higher priority than smaller images.
  
• Limited number of images per page.
  
• Popular and reliable photo sharing hosting.

Optimize your images for social media:

• Use really great images to give your readers another reason to spread the word.
  
• Image originality. There is a special advantage to taking original photos. You can brand them with your logo, URL, or trademark.
  
• To get Digg thumbnailed submission stick to jpg format and make sure the images can be resized to 160Ч120 or 160Ч160 pixels (Unless you have an image that can be resized that way Digg will not offer the submitter a thumbnail to go with the post).

Optimize your images for people:

• People pay more attention to a clear image where they can see details (choose high quality images).
  
• Clean and clear faces in an image get more eye fixation. (Don’t use abstract images too often).
  
• Keep them relevant: images are not the first thing a visitor sees on a web page but they can compel him to stay (according to the eye-tracking research web text is prior to images; when looking at a printed article people see images first; with web page they see text first - nevertheless images make the visitor stay and remember the page via relevant associations).

Gender specific:

• Women are better at recognizing facial emotions than men.
  
• Men seem to be more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body.
  
• Women are more interested in images with more than one person.

Beautiful Pictures

Beautiful Pictures

 

Beautiful Pictures

Sources and Additional Information:
http://www.seosmarty.com/image-seo/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/02/02/how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-search-engines/
http://searchenginewatch.com/3624327

What is Google PageRank?

One of the users of my Blog asked for clarification of what is meaning and importance of the Google (PageRank) for the blog and site popularity. There are online arguing among SEO specialists of how important the PR is for improving your site popularity and site indexing in Search Engines, however, everybody agree on the fact of the higher PR - better. Some Q & A on the topic:

What is Pagerank and how does it work?

PageRank is a system implemented by Google that measures a web page’s significance only taking into account the links and links related factors. The fundamentals are that each web page is giving votes to the links on that page and the power of the vote is established by the number of links pointing to the page that gives the vote. The votes are divided among the links on the page so the lesser number of links, the more share of the vote is given to each link.

How often does Google update their PR?

Google representatives, such as engineer Matt Cutts, have publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank is republished about once every 3 months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are generally unreliable measurements of actual PageRank value for most periods of the year. However, PR is updated at Google daily (or close to daily). New links are factored into the equation and they are applied to a page’s PR. You just cannot see this PR until Google does its next public PR update.

What is the importance of the Google PageRank?

PageRank is important as it used by Google to determine the quality of a Web site. Having a high PageRank will result in faster and more successful search engine positioning. The basic requirements of a high PageRank are: Good Web Site Structure - Structuring your site in a simple and user-friendly fashion will add to your PageRank. The highest PageRank possible for good structure is PageRank 3. To rank higher than a 3, you need good quality links pointing to your site.

How to check Google PageRank for any Website?

While there are many free services and free programs, that are able to check PageRank for any Website, I would recommend using the new free service URLMetrix that is able to check any URL for multiple metrics like: Google Page Rank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Technorati Rank, Google Indexed, Yahoo Indexed, Google Backlinks, Technorati Blog reactions and lots more.

To give a proper ending for the topic of discussion, I want to present nice lyrical song dedicated to PageRank for all current and prospective Webmasters:

PageRank Lyrical Song

Bloggerplugins Help to Optimize Blog Title for Search Engines

You have probably already noticed that when you search Google for something and your blog is present in the search results the Title of the result will be of the form: Blog Title + Post Title. This type of a title is not very attractive to the searchers, and your posts at some degree compete each other. Here is a hack that will change the title to the following more attractive format: Post Title + Blog Title. This trick will help you to optimize the blog title for Search Engines and is expected to drive more visitors to your blog.

Note that it will take some time for the new title format to appear in the search results (actually, following the next re-indexation of your blog by the crawling spider).

Please visit developer Website and follow the recommended way of code modification: http://www.bloggerplugins.org/2007/09/optimise-blog-title-for-search-engine.html