Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2007
I’ll be speaking at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in Chicago during the first week of December.
Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and multiple other books will be one of the keynote speakers at the conference, which is way cool — probably well worth hearing.
I’m travelling back and forth in the next few weeks, so I may only be present at the conference the same day as when I’m speaking. If you’re interested in speaking with me that day, hang around after the panel session or drop me a note in advance.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/16/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Image Optimization, Seminars Conferences, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, ses, SES-Conference, Seth-Godin
Using Flickr to Optimize for Yahoo Image Search
Google Blogoscoped reports that Yahoo’s Image Search now particularly likes Flickr content, so this may be incentive for webmasters to use Flickr “as a kind of Yahoo search engine optimization”. My frequent readers know that I’ve been advocating using Flickr for image search optimization for some time now, and I’ve been speaking on this subject at Search Engine Strategies conferences as well.
The Blogoscoped mention of Yahoo’s love for Flickr content is particularly timely, since Yahoo! announced back in June that they were permanently shutting down Yahoo! Photos in favor of their Flickr property, and the final closing date is tomorrow, September 20th.
Previously, I’d railed a bit against Yahoo! because I’d seen a lot of evidence that they didn’t spider/index Flickr content as well or comprehensively as Google did — altogether ironic since Yahoo owns Flickr. Just as with the anecdotal reports in the Blogoscoped post, I’m seeing nice indications that my earlier criticism of Yahoo’s lack of inclusion of Flickr content may now be completely resolved. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/19/2007
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Yahoo flickr, Image Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, SEO, Yahoo, yahoo-image-search
Target Universal Search via Image SEO – SES San Jose 2007
I’ll be speaking at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose later this month, on the “Images & Search Engines” panel on the second day. The topic of my presentation will be on using Image Sharing Sites for SEO, and I focus particularly upon optimizing through Flickr. I’ll again be speaking with Liana Evans, and Shari Thurow, and we’ll be joined this time with Cris Pierry who is Director of Web & Multi-Media Search at Yahoo!, as well as James Jeude who is Senior Product Manager at Ask.com.
If you’ve missed this session previously, I’d encourage you to consider attending it. The advent of Universal Search at Google has resulted in the integration of top results from other areas of Google’s various vertical searches, smashing together their previous “siloed” sections. Clearly, top placement in each of those silos can now improve your chances of having content appear on the first page of the core web search results, so tips on top placement in Image Search may now be a vital strategy for you as you work upon improving and maintaining rankings on various keyword terms.
I’ve previously written and spoken on optimizing for Image Search, and using images for SEO purposes, and I recently wrote some tips on using images for local search optimization – another of the top three most-popular vertical searches.
Even if you’re working on a site that you don’t feel really lends itself to an image optimization strategy, I’d challenge you to rethink that! Even if you’re in a particularly “dry” industry, you likely could take photos of your products or your employees performing your services, and you could be using those photos for the purposes of SEO. How about even photographing portions of your fabrication process? Not only could those pix get you placement in Image Search as well as with the images component of Universal Search, uploading those pix into some of the more popular image sharing sites out there could result in improving your inbound links, helping to build your overall PageRank. Industries which don’t immediately seem compelling subjects for images may enjoy even greater potential in this area, because the competition might never clue into the advantages of integrating images into the site and into an overall search marketing strategy.
Also at SES San Jose, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, one of the core inventors of their Universal Search design, will be participating in the keynote conversation with Danny Sullivan on Day 3 of the conference – a session I’d highly recommend as “not-to-be-missed”!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 08/06/2007
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Filed under: Conferences, Google, Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Image-Sharing-Sites, Images-&-Search, Marissa-Mayer, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, SES-San-Jose, Universal-Search
Image Sharing Sites & Search Engine Optimization
I just wrote an article on Search Engine Land on how to use image optimizations for local search engine optimization. Even prior to Google’s introduction of Universal Search, a number of us have been suggesting that improving one’s placement in various search verticals beyond the primary web search could help one’s overall natural search marketing program. I’ve written previously about optimization of image content and optimizing through Flickr — and optimizing for local search, while SES Conference sessions have covered optimizing video content, Rohit Bhargarva has written about optimizing through social media, Matt McGee has written on optimizing for Google’s Map Search, and Neil Patel has written on optimizing for blog search.
If you’re interested in a great overview of the convergence of vertical search in the newly blended Universal Search, check out this article by my colleague, P.J. Fusco on “Personalized, Universal and Optimized“.
If you’re interested in more details on how to optimize for image search and how to optimize through image sharing sites such as Flickr, Fotki, and 23, be sure to catch the panel session I’ll be participating in at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose in August. I’ll be joined again by my colleagues, Shari Thurow, and Liana Evans along with perhaps a couple of engineers from Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 07/23/2007
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Image-Sharing-Sites, Images-&-Search, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference
Flickr, why have you screwed up the ALT text?!?
Flickr,
you do a lot that I love – you’re easy to use, and you’ve built-in such elegantly simple and strong features. You’re engineered to function well for SEO, too – your pages are built with spider-friendly URLs, you have multiple link hierarchies, and you allow users to enter in lots of custom text which can allow for optimal TITLEs, H1 text, description captions, user-tagging, and cool geotagging. you even have a fairly cool blog to communicate with your community of users. But, you’ve messed something up this year that irritates the heck out of me:
Flickr’s ALT text is blank on the image pages!
Yes, it’s true – on each image’s main page, the image has nothing in the ALT portion of the image:
<img src=”http://farm1.static.flickr.com/36/112354736_1de2bc367c.jpg?v=0″ alt=”” width=”500″ height=”375″ onload=”show_notes_initially();” class=”reflect”>
I’m pretty sure that your ALT text was working in the past, but at some point, one of your developers made it so that the image’s custom title text no longer gets populated into the IMG ALT parameter, reducing one of the prime signals that inform search engines as to what keywords apply to an image.
Search engines aren’t the only ones that use that ALT text — it’s also important for the vision-impaired who surf the internet using “talking browsers”. Yeah, yeah — I know — why would the vision-impaired be surfing Flickr to begin with? Well, they can run across the pages when searching for various types of information, just like everyone else.
Please, please, Flickr: fix your ALT text!
Yours truly,
A Devoted Fan
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 05/09/2007
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Filed under: Image Optimization, SEO flickr, image-alt, image-alt-text, img-alt, SEO
New Research Could Improve Google Image Search
New research recently published out of University of California – San Diego could allow Google’s Image Search to easily begin using elements from “true image search” — that is, the ability for software to detect and identify elements appearing within the image itself rather than just relying upon external text metadata to associate keywords with the images. Read on for more details.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 04/05/2007
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Filed under: Google, Image Optimization, Research and Development, Searching Google, Google-Image-Labeler, Google-Image-Search, image-search, Supervised-Multiclass-Labeling
Upcoming Speaking Gigs
I have a few speaking gigs coming up for any of you who are interested. I’ll be speaking first in April at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in New York, on the Images & Search Engines panel on the topic of Optimization Through Image Sharing Sites:
The talk focuses primarily upon optimizing via Flickr, since my comparison research indicates that Flickr has the best potential for natural search optimization. You’ll notice that my postings here at Natural Search Blog increasingly have illustrations accompanying them, and I’ve typically hosted those through Flickr just for the SEO value in an effort to “practice what I preach”. 😉
I’ll also be speaking at the American Marketing Association’s Hot Topic Series on Search Engine Marketing in April (San Francisco), May (New York), and June (Chicago) on the subject of “Organic Search is All About Content”. These one-day conferences will have some other great guests such as Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts, Amanda Camp and Vanessa Fox from Google, Eric Ward the link-building expert, Paul O’Brien from HP, and others.
I hope to see you there!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 03/25/2007
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Filed under: Content Optimization, General, Image Optimization AMA-Hot-Top-Series, AMA-Search-Engine-Marketing, American-Marketing-Association-Hot-Topic-Series-on-Sear, search-engine-strategies, Search-Engine-Strategies-Conference, ses, SES-Conference
Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites – SES Presentation
Here is the full Comparison Chart of Image Sharing Sites which I mentioned in my presentation on Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites at the SES Chicago ’06 Conference. Also, here is my PowerPoint presentation on Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites.
There are quite a lot of Image Sharing Sites out there currently, but only a few of them stand out as best-in-class for potential SEO benefit purposes. Read on for a few more notes about this.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 12/06/2006
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, Content Optimization, Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO flickr, Image Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, Image-Sharing-Sites, ses
Dinner at Moto
So, I took Stephan Spencer out to a restaurant here in Chicago tonight that I was dying to try out: Moto Restaurant. We’re both here for the SES Conference, and it’s my first time in Chicago proper, so I wanted to try something I couldn’t get at home in Dallas. Moto had caught my eye because the chef, Homaro Cantu, is apparently something of a mad scientist. He’s known for using all sorts of bizarre ingredients and methods to create his food, and the place has this dangerously edgy feel to it that makes you feel like you’re engaging in borderline risky behaviour, just by eating there.
If you know Stephan, you might know that he tends to prefer simpler food in general, so he nearly balked at the idea of going. Once we’d arrived and had the first course or so, I think he was starting to think that the whole thing might be some horrifying Fu Manchu torture, or perhaps a really bad joke on my part. Read on for more details.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 12/05/2006
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Filed under: General, Image Optimization Food, Image Optimization, Moto-Restaurant
Using Flickr for Search Engine Optimization
I’ve previously blogged about optimization for Image Search. But, images can also be used for optimization for regular web search as well. Where online promotion is concerned, it appears to be an area for advantage which remains largely untapped. Many pros focus most of their optimization efforts towards the more popular web search results, and don’t realize that optimizing for image search can translate to good overall SEO.
Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing sites in the world, with loads of features that also make it qualify as a social networking site. Flickr’s popularity, structure and features also make it an ideal vehicle for search engine optimization. So, how can image search optimization be done through Flickr? Read on, and I’ll outline some key steps to take. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/24/2006
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Filed under: Image Optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO flickr, Image-Search-Optimization, PageRank, Search Engine Optimization, SEO
