11 replies to this topic

[adybee]

Hi,
My client sells digital photography images online. At the moment I'm getting images appearing for one of my clients in the main serps when I search under his name plus the term images - 3 images that aren't actually relevant to his business (this is due to the photo images in the site being designed in flash) but have the same search terms - the domain name comprises of www.clientnameimages.com.

I can't seem to replicate this with other sites at the moment - I tried it with getty images etc. Any suggestions as to why this is happening?

Thanks,

Ady

[Jill]

Sorry, don't really understand what you're asking here.

[qwerty]

I can replicate it: try a search for ansel adams images. (I'm assuming Adams isn't your client, what with him being dead and all...)

[adybee]

I can replicate it: try a search for ansel adams images. (I'm assuming Adams isn't your client, what with him being dead and all...

Hi Qwerty Exactly what's happening and yeah he's not the client lol - Any suggestions on how this is happening and how it can be stopped or altered?

[adybee]

I guess the search for client name and images is allowing G to pull in images related to the client name but is there any way that we can resolve images from other websites appearing?

it's kinda thrown me though e.g. search for lord lichfield images

[jehochman]

Your client needs image optimization. This is straightforward:

1. Provide an alternate HTML representation of your Flash content so search engines can read it.
2. Optimize the images for your desired keywords. Liana Evans gave a good presentation at the last SES how to do this. The main factors, according to her, are:
a. alt attribute
b. caption near the image
c. keywords in image file name, use hyphens, but don't go overboard

[qwerty]

It looks to be pretty rare at Google, but Yahoo does it all the time. In fact, you'll get images in the results over there even if your query doesn't include a word like "pictures" or "images."

[qwerty]

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about this. What Liana's recommending really hasn't been my experience, at least not if we're to assume she's including Google in the strategy she describes. Here's what I wrote:

I can tell you this much: Yahoo is very interested in the alt attribute.

I was checking the rankings on one of my sites yesterday, and when I ran one of the phrases through, I noticed that two images from my site were coming up in the little top four "Image Results" preview on the SERP, so I clicked through to see the full image results. Of the top 20, my site had numbers 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, and 17. Each of the images has the two-word phrase as the first two words of the alt attribute and the only other place on the pages where any part of the phrase appears is in the title tag, where a variation on the second word appears. The keywords are also not in the links to the pages on which these images appear, although they are all over the site. One other thing, and I have no way of knowing based on this whether this makes a difference: all of these images are linked, but they're linked to copies of themselves (some of them to the exact same file, some to a larger version) outside of a page, where they obviously have no place for the keywords to appear, except in the file name, where they are not present.

The home page of the site comes up at #15 for the phrase in the normal results, by the way.

And in case you're interested, this is very different from the results at Google: the site's home page is #5 for the phrase, and on the image search, one picture from the site comes up, at #7. That image does not have the phrase in its alt attribute, but the phrase is the first two words of the page's title tag.

[adybee]

Thanks Johnathan, Qwerty -
Thought i was going a bit mad when i saw this and couldn't replicate it! Great help guys. much appreciated.

[qwerty]

I'm bringing this thread back to life because there seems to have been a spike in talk about getting images to show up in web SERPs, so I did a few quick tests and ended up writing an article about it. It's the second link in my signature.

[tamar]

I'm bringing this thread back to life because there seems to have been a spike in talk about getting images to show up in web SERPs, so I did a few quick tests and ended up writing an article about it. It's the second link in my signature.

Wow qwerty, thanks for the handy reference!

[qwerty]

My pleasure. I was planning on adding some theories about whether it's worthwhile to be found via an image (either in image or web search), and some information about the traffic I've gotten on searches for images, but the article just got to be too long.