If there's one thing that doesn't seem to receive terribly much attention, it's image and video search. There has usually been a session at every conference, but images were often ignored in favour of both paid and regular organic search. Along came blended results and suddenly everybody takes more notice. According to the Video, Images and Blended Results session, image search only accounts for 7 - 15% of all search engine activity, so it's hardly surprising that the integration of images and video into regular SERPs is a relevant topic.
At SMX West, currently underway in Santa Clara, there are a number of sessions involving blended search. Two of the most obvious blended search results are images and videos, making them harder to ignore. Google took away one huge click that people had to make, bringing images and videos out into the main search results. They're still relatively rare: you can make quite a few queries without discovering images and videos. Speakers Todd Friesen, Eric Enge, Benu Aggarwal, and Henry Hall brought up quite a few reasons why you should improve your image and video optimisation for the sake of them appearing in regular SERPs.
One thing I find particularly interesting about blended results is how each feature is treated differently, either as an additive or a subtractive result. Videos are subtractive, whereas news stories are additive. However infuriating it may be to find yourself removed from an optimal SERP position due to a video, it isn't the case that you can't do anything about it. At the least, if you see a video ranking for your keyword, you know that Google gladly includes blended results for that query. Given this knowledge, you can attempt to rank your own blended content.
One great piece of information from this panel was the change in how people look at search results pages when blended content is included. These heat maps show how much more interest people seem to take in the results as a whole when they are presented with a range of content. This is great news for multiple people: Google can be pleased that people are finding interesting content in all of its results, as they'll likely keep coming back if they feel they've been given a whole page of good resources. It's good news for SEOs who have traditionally believed that no one looks beyond the first three results. It's also good for all of us - search engine users - who are apparently finding the whole page useful.
While no one could give us a sure-fire way to have images appear at the top of a blended results page (and how could they; if we all knew how to do it, there would still be limited real estate at the top of the page), they brought up some interesting points about the oddities of Google's image listings. For example, the images that Google returns as blended results aren't the top results from the images' page. They also sometimes appear to be a bit "random" and not necessarily optimal. Take a look at a search for "pictures of santa clara": if you receive the same results as I do, you'll see a rudimentary map, a slightly better map of the entire county, and a picture of the mission of Santa Clara. I don't agree that any of those results are particularly helpful... if I'd made that query, I'd probably want pictures of the city. Also compare these to the regular image results. Only the mission picture appears on that page.
To me, these less than optimal results within blended search suggest that Google has a little way to go before the images it chooses are totally relevant. While determining relevancy and quality must be harder than with written content, I have every faith that Google can sort it out. Of course, three pictures can never serve everyone's needs, but no one is going to be satisfied with the Santa Clara blended images.
I would have thought it went without saying that general optimisation of a site as a whole goes a long way to having images and videos show up in blended results and image searches. Perhaps it needed to be repeated, because there were quite a few mentions of basic concepts such as including good meta information, well-worded alt attributes, titles and URLs. Really, there's no problem in emphasising what we should all be doing already, because we don't know where one additional piece of information will make the difference between a great listing and invisibility.
By: Jane Copland
Video and Images in Search Results: SMX West
Events
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
My research (which is a bit out of date: June of last year) basically indicated that file names and alt attributes didn't make much if any difference. It really came down to the optimization of the page on which an image appears.
My experience says if you can naturally blend a keyword in the title tag, (image alt tag or file name) and most importantly in the url of the containing page, you have bright chances to appear in the image search almost same goes with video search too.
Thanks a lot I was wondering about this. Anyone have any more info on optimizing for these results?
Yes, and I expect to get hearty thumbs up for this, include your image in the same HTML tag as the text you'd like to associate with that image. For example, if it's in a table, don't separate the image from it's description with another cell. If it's a link, make both the text and the image one link. If it's in a paragraph, keep the descriptive text in that same paragraph and so on.
As with text-based SEO, linking to an image externally with descriptive anchor text is a definite help, as is linking to a page dedicated to the image. You can accomplish much of this via internal linking, but those external links are always good.
Thumbed up--I heard the exact same tip from a very intelligent source. :)
w00t! Hopefully the peeps enjoy that one. Analytics is another helpful way to pick up image search ideas. One note, although the traffic tends to be a bit different with image searches than text clicks, I've found that a lot of times image searchers will link more readily.
edit: After your comment I had to go make sure it wasn't a Premium Tip as well that I just recalled subconsciously. Ha. :D
Bulls eye..!! A Thumbs up from me too !! :)
I haven't done any of my own research, but some things I've seen around the place tend to confirm this. Like when pictures of me ranked for malinois puppy because those words appeared on my SEOmoz profile page.
And, ah, sorry for the emails you all got that said "rebecca has commented on the Video and Images post." I'm using her computer and didn't realise that I was not logged in as myself. Ha! The damage I could have done...
One thing GOOG et al should do is follow Live.com's lead and make image searching zoom & scrollable. I don't know if there are patent constraints, but scrolling through images instead of clicking new pages is a much more natural zoom and scan motion for visual information. GOOG already does this via Youtube when the video finishes and you can drag on to others, it would make sense to add such a widget like function to blended search results. Benefits:
1. It'd maintain current SERP real estate
2. It make visual searches from those results much more engaging.
3. They could garner ranking info by click throughs.
4. Etc...
heh - I didn't get any images when I tired your Santa Clara search.
How do you folks think blended results could benefit a sporting goods e-commerce site?
Does anyone think that clicking through blended results becomes more spontaneous?
I mean, when we look through plain text results, we tend to focus on titles and snippets and click only relevant results but with blended search we get distracted by images, videos, maps, etc?
On a similar note, could the heatmaps (thanks for them, Jane) mean that people spend more time on the serp (and that's actually not that good as search results page is meant not to appeal but to direct people to the relevant site).
These are just my random thoughts, I have no supporting/demolishing resources for that, so if someone does, please share!
I think Google must give little more room to the blended search on the result page while displaying the most popular videos and images for that keyword search. That'll make Google more interesting and will also help Google to recapture the market, it has lost to players like Digg and stumpleupon.
With the current limited place Google has given to blended search, one has to be lucky to appear in it. So minor structural changes can make life easier for Google, Google users and offcourse for we SEO's too. :)
Jane, i've attended 2 of the blended search results sessions and here is my opinion :
On one hand - I stake much in blended search, I only do in-house SEO for my company and both my president and I are VERY excited about what is to come in blended results.
On the other hand, It seems to me that SMX is beating it into our heads with the search 3.0 track...everything that has been shared after the opening keynote is just elaborating on concepts that are just that, concepts. I enjoy hearing the different thoughts and viewpoints and anticipations of what might happen, but I'm not attending anymore search 3.0/4.0 track sessions, save maybe 1 session on wednesday.
I actually feel really bad for having this opinion, so i'm sorry to all who are sharing the rest of these sessions. Perhaps attended 4.0 tomorrow morning will change my mind!
Hey Now Jane,
I really like this post, I knew pix & flix are very important & I learned some good facts to back this up by reading this post.
Thx 4 the info,
Catto
This is very interesting because the image used from Searchengine Land is less about "blended search" than about paid ads associated with organic search results. If you go to Ask.com and use "Oscars" as your search term, you get blended search, images, encyclopedia, news, video. If you perform the same search on Google, you get the familiar list of organic results. It has been a known issue for some time that customers start in the upper right corner and work their way down the results set in a F pattern. What is less known but equally interesting is Mark Hurst's concept of the Page Paradigm (customers tend to focus on the center of the page and ignore navigation and other facts in the side columns) and Danialson's research on Transitional Volatility (changes in state, i.e contextual navigation) make an impression on the customer enticing use.
Blended search is great and I have no doubt that Yahoo, Google and the others will eventually catch up to the Ask.com model. That said, I keep the SEO benefits from image optimization in the "nice to have column" as they are most useful for a majority of the search engines only when someone is looking for an image.