Feb/102
Denver SEO Image Results Are Back
Recently, in Google search results…
Last summer, Google was testing many new technologies that are now a regular part of search results, such as Google Profiles. They had been very aggressive in adding video and images into results as well. This meant that in addition to the ten links, there were video, image, map and profile results that were all in the mix.
Google then backed away from so aggressively integrating those results into search results, and has been slowly refining and redefining their layout.
- Changed the width of the results so that instead of 100% browser width, results now have a maximum width. Many people believe that this is to increase click-through rates for the sponsored results.
- Added real-time search results (“Latest results from…”) from Twitter and news websites after they brokered a deal to access Twitter data
- Added weather, sports results, and other “factual” results above organic results
- Increased the width of the “OneBox”
There have been many changes over the past year, and many more will come.
Images return in “Denver SEO” search results
Google shows images for the search Denver SEO...is that what users are wanting?
During that span of time last year, images were shown for the query “Denver SEO,” but since then have disappeared. Now, they are back, and given a prominent location in the search results (currently between position 3 and 4).When a user searches for Denver SEO, why would they want an image? The only explanation I can think of is that SEOs may be clicking on their own image results to artificially give weight and relevance to something that I believe isn’t hugely relevant.
What’s even more interesting is that some of the images don’t even have alt text or title attributes that Google would read to know what the image is about. Thus, Google is simply inferring that the images are relevant based on the surrounding content and the name of the image file itself.
Analysis of shown images
The first two images shown are from the same page and are right next to each other on the page. They have the same alt text, and virtually the same title attribute.
<img src="images/denver-seo-local-company2.jpg" title="Denver SEO Company Image" alt="Denver SEO Company Image">
<img src="images/denver-seo-local-company1.jpg" title="Denver SEO Companies Image" alt="Denver SEO Company Image">
The next image is from the Katz Web Services website and has alt and title attributes.
<img src="images/seo-chart.gif" alt="Denver SEO Results" title="You want SEO results? You need a great SEO company with a background in code, design, and thinking outside the box." width="460" height="309"/>
The fourth image is from HighPoint SEO and has relevant alt and title attributes.
<img title="Denver SEO - 2009 in Review" src="http://highpointseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Denver-SEO-2009-in-Review.JPG" alt="2009 was a Big Year for HighPoint SEO" width="341" height="352" />
The last image has no alt or title tag, and is from New Media Denver.
<img src="http://www.newmediadenver.com/images/SEO-special.gif">
What is the take-away?
I believe the moral of the story is that alt and title tags help get images properly indexed by Google, but that surrounding content and image file names are most important.
What are your thoughts?
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12:33 pm on February 21st, 2010
Hi Zack,
I’m glad you wrote this post. I had been noticing the increase in image indexing across a lot of verticals, so this was partially an experiment. I wanted to see how much alt tags actually mattered, vs. the file name etc…
As you can see, we didn’t use the term “Denver SEO”, in our alt attributes, and no title, we strictly used the term in the file name and it ranked in less than 2 weeks.
Unfortunately these results don’t define the single on-site factor that is MORE important: surrounding content, the title, alt description, or file name, but it does show what the main on-site rankings factors are.
The one factor that isn’t investigated here are the links to the page (or to the images themselves) and how they influence the rankings of image. To take this post a bit further and examine the links would be pretty beneficial to all reading.
Good post as usual!
Cheers,
Chris Gragg
6:44 pm on March 2nd, 2010
Direct image links and pages 301′d to jpg’s have affected this as well on some other projects.