SES conference New Sharp View: Image Search Optimization A few steps away?

One of the main trends that emerged at the San Jose search engine Strategy (SES) Conference is that the role of image search is increasingly important. This article will talk about how the importance of image search gradually increases and how it gradually increases. and will explore how to optimize your site in this respect.

First, use some data to explain why image search is increasingly important:

1. Ask.com's CEO, Jim Lanzone, said that 50% of the search results they provided on ask3d were not traditional http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/11510.html "> Web searches."

2. At the image Search conference, attendees Shari Thurow said that 15% to 16% of the web searches were for images. That's an amazing number!

3. Shari Thurow also provides the following data. Usability testing shows that comparing text links, users prefer to click on images. Experienced search engine optimization experts will know what this means. You are missing more clicks because you provide text links. But you can easily make up for this flaw by putting a nice image link at the top and making the footer's generic menu a text style.

4. From a site i monitor, Google image search has become a stable, more important reference. Among the references, the top 5 are regularly ranked. This is true even if it is not an image-centric site.

One of the most important factors contributing to the above issues is the emergence of broad/integrated/mixed search results. Integrating images into the web search results is a more complete way to significantly increase the access of users to available image data. In addition, more and more people are becoming aware of how colorful image search has become. People are getting high quality search results. Therefore, for more and more searchers, when necessary, the image search has become a natural response.

Image Search Optimization

Now that we know that image search represents an important opportunity, we can now explore other aspects of Image search and list the basic elements of Image search optimization.

Obviously, the first step is to draw a picture of whether the image should, and to what extent, match the user experience of your site. This step is not irrelevant. Next, you should decide how to get and where to get original images for your site. Image search engine and web search engine like, do not like to copy content, so you need to get your own original image. Once you have solved this problem, be prepared. The following steps are available for Image search engine optimization:

1. Use the keyword in the alt tag attribute. This is a critical step, and this is the best chance for you to label your images clearly. You know, the following words will have a lot of search content: photos, photos, images, photos, videos or places. When it comes to locations, if your image describes the physical location, include some location information in the ALT tag attribute.

2. Note: the "header" (named) label attribute is usually ignored. Don't waste your time on it.

3. Select a logical file name that can be enhanced with keywords. Use a hyphen in the file name to differentiate each word in the keyword. That's a good idea. But do not exceed two hyphens. Do not use underline to make the word segmentation.

4. Use a descriptive file name, using the same style as the alt tag attribute.

5. Also note the file name extension. For example, if the image search engine sees ". JPG file name extension, which assumes that the file is a photograph.

6. Basic Web page optimization techniques should also be applied. Like what:

A, the page's "head" (named) label

b, text near the image

C, the overall theme of the entire page content

D, the overall theme of a site or part of a site

7. Another important thing is to create a link to the page that contains the image. A link can be a discussion about an image. You can also use a simple method to paste the page containing the image on the del.icio.us.

8. Avoid copying content on the site. For example, you have a thumb size image, a medium sized image and an image of an original size. You don't want these images to be indexed. The best way to handle this problem is to use robots.txt to prevent the searcher from seeing the version you don't want to index (most likely it will be a thumb size or an image of the original size).

There are other interesting questions that emerge from the discussion. Participants Liana Evans raised the question of how the reputation management of image search differs from the reputation management of web search. You should know where your personal, your brand and your company photos appear. You should work actively to make sure that the pictures appearing in the usual search results fit the picture you are trying to create.

In addition, image theft is a real problem and hard to stop. One thing you can do is put text in the image, such as "who provided the photo", and who provided the image. Although such measures do not completely prevent image theft. But at least the thief needs to do some image editing before using it.

In short, image search can bring great results to your business. Of course, you need to determine whether the resulting traffic is related to the site, and whether the visitors will eventually do what you want on the site. Think about it in your head, look back at each step and see how you can optimize your image search to fit your overall website strategy. (Zebian Admin01)