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Search engines, and Google in particular through its Universal Search initiative, are making great strides towards delivering multi-media search engine results. Images, audio, and video links are being sprinkled into certain types of searches. The tough part about this desire is that it can be hard for a search spider to determine the actual content or intent or a photo or video. But, that’s where you come in.
Actively using images as part of your overall optimization strategy can pay dividends.
The first step is to make certain that you use the ALT attribute in your web site HTML. Further adding descriptive captions in the text around a your photos is another standard practice.
To take this thought up a notch, however, you should consider creating images pages on social media sites and optimizing those pages as well.
The first place to go in my opinion is Flickr.com - Flickr, owned by Yahoo, is one of several photo sharing sites. Other popular ones include Picasa, owned by Google and Photobucket. These sites allow you to create accounts and they upload your photos for sharing publicly or with friends.
All of these services have created sets of tools that allow you to tag and describe your photos. Most people use these as a way to sort, categorize and find their photos, but marketers can use these tools to perhaps create some interesting search juice.
Flickr, for example, allows you to create a separate page for each photo. This page has meta tags you choose - title, description and keyword tags as well as H1 title, and keyword anchor text backlinks. You can view an example page here featuring my Ultimate Marketing System product. This is not simply a ploy to point out my products, the point is to show you how this tactic creates a well opitimized page and photo on a highly indexed web site, pointing to my product. This page will get indexed and may rank highly on its own. (Right click and view the source code on this page and have a look at the meta tags data)
This is a potentially potent way to create some nicely optimized backlinks to your site and generate page views of your products, events, announcements, people, and activities. Once you know how to navigate around Flickr it’s pretty easy to create lots of these pages. Don’t forget to take advantage of the geo tagging that allows you to create local content.
- Here’s your recipe for success with this idea
- Upload lots of decently composed images
- Create strong, keyword rich, unique titles for each photo
- Tag each photo with your most important keywords
- Write good descriptions and add a link to your site with keyword anchor text
- Make sure the photos are publicly viewable - it’s a check box option
- Submit the photo pages to other social sites such as delicious
It’s great if you have riveting images with tons of viral potential, but this works wonders for any well taken image.
Comments
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at Mar 30, 08 | 10:36 am and is filed under Google, Search Engines, Universal Search, Yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Excellent articles, John. Consider that something like this could also help traffic to sites that have an interest in photos:
http://www.imagesearchscript.com
The simplicity of this is that people are searching for photos on those sites and if they own a site, they’re not making any money with their searches.
I enjoyed reading your article! Keep up the good work!
Flickr don’t allow you to use their services for commercial purposes, and I would imagine that doing this would be classed as commercial use — I’d be very wary of doing this myself!
Incase your wondering, take a look here http://flickr.com/guidelines.gne
Unless I’m missing something, I don’t think this would work!
[...] Read more at Duct Tape Marketing. [...]
FYI, Flickr gets up in arms if you make your Flickr photos too promotional in nature, and if you link back to your site on too high of a percentage of your total photos.
I was using Flickr to host photos of customers using my products, as well as some product photos, with links back to those product pages on my site.
Flickr got mad and emailed me and made me remove all of the links I had in the descriptions that went back to the product pages.
I didn’t think it was over the top promotional at all, but they did.
I still think Flickr is great, and we put a lot of high resolution product shots up there so that members of the media can download them directly from Flickr and we don’t have to email them huge files.
But I don’t consider it a search optimization thing based on my experience, and I think they really discourage that kind of use.
I think all of your tips for using Flickr are dead on, except for the keyword anchor text link back thing, which they might zap you for if you do it with more than just a small, small percentage of your photos.
[...] Using images in SEO Usually “images” and “SEO” (or search engine optimisation) wouldn’t go in the same sentence. Some interesting advice here, on making the most of your images (tags: flickr socialmedia seo) [...]
More, links hosted by Flickr are marked with the attribute rel=”nofollow” instructing spiders not to index the destination website. While you may gain in visitor visibility, don’t expect your pagerank to benefit from it.
I truly believe that the only concerns one should have with images is the loading time for those visitors that are still using dial up.
@Lars
i also use flickr for backlink at each image but never got a complain.
On one of my websites, I’m using a subdirectory to collect articles, but it could be used to hold photos. Google sees a subdirectory as another website, but your visitor sees it as a branch of your website.
http://beautyreview.newbeautysuccess.com
images are also significant for black optimization (so called doors). Search engines do not welcome them, or fighting them, so its your prime task to make the door unique. So, the images must be unique and there is a soft that cuts the same pucture into quite different pieces on the same template
Its unfortunate though that one can use the ALT tag rather dubiously, using irrelevant keywords merely to get undeserved positive attention
[...] Original post by John Jantsch [...]
John
A nicely written article, thanks for putting this together and explaining how Flickr could be used for SEO.
Only yesterday I wrote a similar article on how companies can maximine their assets; however this is not just images but also video and other media assets:
http://press20.blogspot.com/2008/04/portable-content-more-considerations.html
regards and keep up the good work
Hayden
http://press20.blogspot.com
[...] Get more tips for this Flickr.com photo strategy here. [...]
[...] don’t be afraid to get creative with your local content. You would be surprised just how much traffic a Google image search or YouTube video could bring [...]
Excellent article John. I also wrote a guide a while back about how to use Flickr for SEO that expands on some ideas here. If anyone wants to check it our here it is:
http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/flickr-is-not-useless-for-seo/
Keep the good posts coming, John.
Hi John
I linked to this post in my article on Flickr Marketin. I’d love it if you’d send all your readers over to check it out!
http://tinyurl.com/4bjf7x