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A DigitalPoint Forums member has discovered a way to optimize images for long tail searches that will yield results in both Google Web Search and Google Image Search.
He says that the best way to optimize the images is to create a separate page that is heavily targeted towards the image that you are creating and then you can link to that page and the image. In his example, he shows how to target the keyword "Black Ferrari 612 Scaglietti," which yields the following results:
- You’ve added a highly-optimised page for the keywords ‘Black ferrari 612 scaglietti’.
- Courtesy of the ‘Back’ anchor on the new page, when a visitor finds the new page through the search engines they can easily find the attached content page.
- You’ve added more content to your site, and SEs love new content & big sites.
As a photographer, this is a pretty neat way of getting the images that I post on my personal photoblog optimized for more search exposure.
We have discussed previously how to optimize images for Google as well.
Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.
Comments:
Jason Bartholme
03/29/2007 02:47 pm
We are just now getting into optimizing the images on our main site. Before I worked here, they named the first image Lead.jpg then Fig1.jpg, etc. We receive decent traffic, but I think once we rework the thousands of images, we will get good portion of out traffic from GIS.
Lars H
03/29/2007 03:56 pm
What is the advantage of this traffic, from everyone else's perspective? I get a lot of Google Image traffic because I name my image files in a meaningful way and give them alt text. But from what I see, it's all junk traffic that I get, and none of it converts into sales. It's mostly just people looking for photos to look at, or steal and use in their own documents and on their own sites, best I can figure.
Brian Auer
03/29/2007 05:17 pm
This is great stuff. My photo gallery already incorporates some of these things. Each image has its own page, the title of the page is the title of the image, the title of the image is on the page again, and the image keywords are listed. The things I need to incorporate are the alt and title tags in addition to wrapping the photo title inside of a header tag. Great stuff, thank you! In response to the question by Lars, some of us are actually selling the images, so it does convert into sales directly.
Erika
03/29/2007 08:07 pm
Tamar- this is a great post. I really think there is a lot more that can be done for images to have successful conversions. I am a bit concerned however that the forum speaker is suggesting a black hat practice for SEO, unless it is images linking to pages that are already relevant for the ALT text phrase, like a Ferrari sales page featuring that exact model. Also, for Lars, maybe he can make a mash-up of images like those seen on flickr and disable the right click to help prevent the stealing (not totally alleviate it). Overall, image search is big and I always find good sites that way, and often tend to come back to them later. In fact, i have even searched products I wanted to buy through an image search and when I found the one that "looked good" to me, I bought it. The images can convert, it is just about the page content being appealing once the traffic gets there. Lars, show us your image page, I bet we can find three reasons to leave! lol.
gid
04/02/2007 12:08 am
I agree with Jason. I run several sites with one being an online store. I get a large amount of hits from image searches, and I have never converted on any of them with either PPC or actual sales. I have named my images just like I would name an SEO friendly url. I have done no other optimization for images. If someone could come up with a way to convert using images, then I am all ears!
Gath Adams
04/03/2007 02:21 am
I posted the thread on DP - sorry for the late addition to the conversation but I only just noticed this post. The DP thread stated that the optimisation helps for google Web Search as well as Image search. Personally, I get a lot more benefit (more converting visitors) from web search than image search. Erika - I am not sure what you mean by a Black Hat SEO method. I am suggesting linking to a page that has exactly the same image that was clicked on (or perhaps a bigger pic, like you would get in a gallery).