Yeah! Google is giving easily spamable results more exposure in their search results. Untill now it wasn’t worth the hassle to optimize video, images, news, local or books. But thanks to Google Universal Search this content will start showing up in the normal results. How to optimize these types of content for search is still unknown to many SEOs, so be one of the first to know and make it your specialty. In this article I will focus on image search.
First let me tell you how much impact universal search will have. Google shows these extra results at the top, in the middle and/or at the end of search results. A search for “darth vader” shows it all. Images on top, a movieclip in the middle and related search and news results at the bottom.
These results really stand out and a visitor will more likely click one of the special results. Because they stand out so much, they hugely impact how people perceive the results. If this is something positive for Google usage remains to be seen, but it sure is something positive for us search result influencers. It is like the wild west has opened up again with new frontiers.
Reputation management
Before I tell how you can influence search verticals like image search, I would like to show an example of reputation management issues that will arise.
These are the results for the Dutch prime minister “balkenende”.
Because he looks somewhat geeky like “Harry Potter”, people created images showing him as Harry Potter. His reputation can only benefit from it, but in most cases having the wrong pictures on top of your name or company name search is something bad. I just got hired to boost pictures of a drunk CEO when searching for a company name. Although this isn’t very ethical, I wanted to try it (and I don’t have morals 
).
Optimizing image search
No, search engines don’t look at the image itself! Most search engines have little image recognition skills (But look at this example to see what Google can do: image type: face). It would just take too much processing power. Duplicate images, x-rated and other unwanted pictures are filtered with some image recognition, but nothing very advanced.
So what do they look at?
- Most search engines, including Google, prefer images that are used within the content of the website. Otherwise they would index your entire navigation and design.
Some believe images after one of the first paragraphs are the most likely ones to be included in image search.
Pages with texts containing just a few images are more likely to have high ranking images than entire galleries.
Update: Someone just told me it matters if the image is also a link. He says it is better to have an unlinked image. I haven’t tested this, but it would make sense. - The used alt text and text in the immediate surrounding of the image tell the most about its content. Just be concise and descriptive and have it contain little more than the phrase you want to rank for. The title tag of the image seems to have some effect.
The image name or URL should also contain the search term. Be sure to separate words with for instance a dash, slash, hyphen or dot. Relying on stemming isn’t always good. - If the image is contained by a page (and site) that ranks for the search term and also has many related links (with the correct anchor text) to it, that boosts the image ranking very much. Because not many images are optimized intentionally, a ranking page with an image in the content (that might not even contain a correct image) will be the most likely winner for most searches. To even appear in image search the image needs to be on a site with enough links to it in general.
- An image that is requested from multiple websites (the url on the original source is used to show the image) with the right alt text etcetera has even more chance of ranking.
I was also told that a copied image (same filename and image properties (bits, resolution, colors, size, etc.)) located on another website, helps the ranking of the original source, but I haven’t seen any proof yet. - An image situated on a strong website (for instance a high PR page) is more likely to get indexed. To see all listed images from a single domain, use the site:domain.com command in image search. I hope my site is strong enough to get some images listed, but otherwise I’ll try to boost them via stronger sites.
Example 1:
You should try to get an image of yourself rank for your own name. I haven’t got round to it before, but here it is: In the near future this ugly image should score for the phrase Peter van der Graaf.
Peter van der Graaf
I get many reactions because of my ugly avatar with the green background. I have to say all of this is intentional. It stands out on for instance MyBlogLog and people visit my site to see what weirdo has visited their site.
Example 2:
If this was the first paragraph of a page, it would contain some bla bla on the topic and it should contain the search phrase I wanted the image to rank for. In this case the image below needs to rank for “balkenende search results”. Bla bla as you might know premier balkenende is wel known for his raar kapsel. Jan Peter Balkenende looks a bit like harry potter. Look at the image below for the balkenende search results.
Balkenende search results
This would be the next paragraph with more related bla, but it doesn’t really matter what I type. As long as it is enough text to fill another paragraph. So here I go: Search results are bla di bla and prime minster or Wouter Bos is something related as well. I will type some more to fill some text, but now I am finished.
Check the image search results for “balkenende search results” in a few weeks and this image is sure to score. It takes a lot more time for the image to get indexed, than it does for a normal page.