On my Flickr account, I get a very large portion of my photo views from Google and Yahoo search results. Flickr has a very large amount of traffic (#33 on Alexa currently), and the search engines seem to rank it favorably. Yet, if there are 10 photos of the same thing on Flickr, which one comes up on top for Google? What factors come into play, and how can you optimize your photos to have the best chance at highest rank?
I was at the Official Google Meetup in Cambridge the other night where I had a chance to poke at the brains of the very people who work at Google who would know the answers to these questions. It ends up that what effects the search ranking of photos currently is far simpler than I had imagined.
The things that effect search rank are:
Inbound Links: The number, quality of (via Pagerank), and of text (both of the link itself and the text surrounding) links pointing to a photo’s page effect if the photo ranks highly. As always with SEO, having links from multiple strong websites is better than having multiple links on a from a single strong site. So in short, the more people using your photos, linking to them with rich and descriptive text, the better.
The Photo Title: The title of the photo becomes both the H1 and the title for the page, as well as the ALT text for the photo. Make this descriptive as you would any blog post. You want it to be not too long, and filled with strong unique words. “Sunset” is probably a poor title, but “Sunset in Winter over the Charles River” is likely far better. Under no circumstance should you keep the default name that the camera kicks out like, “DSC_0057″. Even if you can’t uniquely title every photo from an event, put up something that describes the event like, “ROFLCon 2008 at MIT” for all of the photos. Its better than nothing.
Other on-page text. The group that your photo belongs to is an H3, as are any photo pools. From what I can tell, your description under the photo and tags are just viewed as normal text, but since there’s so little of it on the page it is taken heavily into account (although I could imagine that text in the comments could outweigh these easily).
That’s it. I really thought there might be more to it (and maybe in the future there will be). They said that whatever Google builds, they want to be platform agnostic and work equally on Flickr, Picassa, Smugmug, etc. The only other thing that will have minor effect would be the size of your photo, since people can filter on Google to search by photo size but generally as long as its VGA resolution then it doesn’t matter.
What doesn’t matter:
Number of contracts you have via Flickr
Number of groups the photo is a member of (except for the influence of the H3 text on-page)
Number of tags (its just text on page, and the text overall is sparse so you aren’t going to really overdo it and dillute things)
Number of internal photo views via Flickr
EXIF Camera Data (currently Google doesn’t really read into these)
Creative Commons vs Rights Reserved license
Geotagging (might matter at some point, but doesn’t seem to effect things overall right now)
So my general optimization tips:
Properly title every photo you put up there. Try to have unique titles for each one as much as possible. Include the name of the event in the title somewhere (ie, “Moot, Founder of 4chan, ROFLThing 2009“) because the group overall doesn’t attach well since its only an H3.
Use groups and sets to help organize things. This is good practice overall.
Use tags heavily
Use a description when you can, filling out things that don’t really fit as tags
Submit the photo to as many pools as possible. While the name of the pools, like your groups, is only an H3, it still helps massively for getting traffic and comments.
Upload the larger resolution photos where possible (so that if someone is searching for a “large” image via google it will appear)
Consider use of a Creative Commons license to encourage people to reuse and credit (linking to) the photo. More links = higher ranking and Creative Commons is a great way to get your content used and linked to.
Encourage as many people to use the photo on their page (and link into the photo and use good ALT text), or simply to link to the photos (with good title text). Suggest to people text to use in, or around the links. The more consistent this text is, the more Google will understand “what” your photo is, aside from just your title. One easy way to do this is to send people links to photos of them, and encourage them to use the photos.
From an event, focus on getting one specific photo promoted as much as possible. It might not be possible to get all of them highly ranked and promoted, but if you can get a lot of people linking into a single photo then that will be massively helpful. Start off by putting that photo on your blog, tumblr, etc and encouraging everyone to do the same. Getting 100 photos ranked highly from a single thing will be hard, but you can get one of them going well pretty easily.
Search on Google for what you’re planning to name the photo. If a lot of other photos come up, consider tweaking the name a bit. If you get something unique, it will likely appear near the top.
SEO, Google and overall ranking is something that’s constantly changing. The Google guys suggested that one of the best places to contact them for up-t0-date information is in the Google Webmaster Tools Forums. All of my photos can be found on my Flickr page and are Creative Commons Licensed.
Ann All from It BusinessEdge wrote a blog entry respondingto a survey that indicated at least 39% of 18-24 year old workers would consider quitting their jobs if Facebook was filtered out/banned at work. 16 percent of 25-to-65-year-olds say they would consider the same. She feels that the workers need to grow up and offers various reasons including stress on a company network, to the fact that she feels a large amount of time on facebook is spent on sports and games. Of course Digg caught the article and twisted in new opinionated ways.
Many of the people commenting seem to feel the same way, and that an employee that might consider such should be fired. She ends the post stating, “In another decade, a lot more workplaces may look like Google.”
Is being like Google in your hiring practices a bad thing? Google is hiring probably some of the smartest and innovative people available. If those people can still function and poke someone back on Facebook once a day, then go for it.
From my personal experience, she is wrong as are most of the commenters. I just miss the 18-24 group by a year, but still feel that I can comment on my time in jobs in those six years.
In my mind a company that restricts internet access has a few problems. First, they likely don’t trust employees, and they likely don’t have good employees or management. Also it is a sign of a slow and stagnated corporate culture generally that is either just floating by, or not really growing very well.
So my jobs from 18-24, and how they related to internet access and comments on the general corporate culture. Of course, many of these years predate Facebook
18:
Guilford County Information Services: Super restrictive internet access. Even looking up something on Rock Climbing pulled up a porn filter as I guess some keyword set it too. Super control, everything restrictive. A government entity, no innovation, no growth, stagnation. No long term connections or friends made
Washington Printing Supplies: Small company, no restrictions on internet access. I did well there, made some of the best money I have ever made, got a ton done and generally didn’t waste much time. I still occasionally keep touch with some people from here and maintain social connections
19:
RoadRunner/Time Warner Cable: No restrictions, but a general attitude against person web use. Not a growing company. I can’t even name anyone that I know that still works there. We know they are against Net Neutrality.
Office Max: Restricted internet access. Large company. Little productivity by any employee. Horrid Management. They went bankrupt a few months after I quit. No long lasting social connections.
20: Taylor’s recording studio: Super small company, no restrictions. I helped to grow a (still) successful recording studio and start it on a path for yet more success in an industry that is otherwise failing. Many long lasting connections, recommendations, and friends
22: MacPherson Group: Small company. Growing relatively slowly. No restrictions, but internet access no encouraged for personal use/time. No lasting social connections.
23: State Street Bank: Restricted internet access. Very slow growth as a company. No innovation, period. No lasting social connections even though I worked with 200 people on my floor.
24: Portrait Innovations: Restricted/banned internet access generally, low level employees, high turnover. Growth as a company, but never for employees. Negative innovation. A few lasting social connections from training only.
25: Jazkarta: No restrictions on internet access. All Open Source/Free Software. Massive growth from time started. High productivity. High use of social networking. Super innovative environment/company. New ideas everywhere. I have never had a social network of friends so large.
The general trend I have seen in my personal time working is this: Slower growing, less innovative companies that generally hire worse employees will have restrictions on their internet access because they do not trust their employees. They want their employees to complete a specified task, and that is all. No research needed, no new ideas wanted, no innovation. This generally leads towards high turnover and slow growth. Also there are few to no long term lasting social connections made from these companies.
On the flip side companies that embrace the thoughts, skills, interest, uniqueness and autonomy of their employees including providing them unfettered internet access and full choice of what computers/software they want to use do rather well. They have new ideas, fast growth, strong social bonds that last a lifetime. Good things happen.
At the same time, I realize that many people in the 18-24 group have really crappy jobs that basically just require that you complete a repetitive task. I feel I’ve been lucky and for the most part (asides from OfficeMax and Portrait Innovations) avoided those. Do you want a cashier on Facebook in a high volume store? Likely not. At the same time, many companies could benefit from stronger social connections between employees. Our company (Jazkarta) has a Facebook group among other such pages.
Many of those other companies restricting internet access haven’t caught up to the times. They don’t use Twitter for customer service, or Facebook. They don’t understand what a Wiki is, or how to make a PodCast. They don’t know how to really monitor customer satisfaction or connect with customers. The only marketing they understand is a billboard or TV commercial. Everything is one way with them. They also likely don’t embrace employees blogging.
So would I quit a job if they banned Facebook? No. Not just Facebook, but I would have a serious conversation with them trying to figure out why they had and then perhaps depending on their reasoning consider quitting. If it’s because they don’t trust me, then I’d quit. If it was for some security/network reason… I might ask why their network sucks so much or what the security issue is and how we can fix it.
I would however not consider for a moment working for a company that doesn’t embrace Social Media technologies overall. If email is new to the company (hello, 1961 is calling and wants their technology back) then I wouldn’t work there. Companies need to move with the times.
Oh and Ann… if all companies looked like Google the world would be a better place.
EDIT: Also, let’s not forget that many companies base their entire businesses off Facebook. I have some friends that run a (venture backed) Virtual Goods company. Should they stay off of Facebook. Should other people promoting social networking applications stay off facebook? What if we are writing API things for it or trying to integrate?
Yahoo is ranked as the #1 site on the Internet by Compete and Alexa. Google being #2 by traffic.
My question is who the hell uses Yahoo? These services don’t group together all of their web properties likes YouTube or Orkut. The only two Yahoo properties that I personally visit are Flickr and MyBlogLog. Everything else is Google.
I know that I’m not the “typical” internet user, but I don’t see anyone and I mean anyone going to Yahoo for search, groups, email, etc these days. Then again, half the people I know have iPhones, and 3/4 use Apples.
As a small note, Yahoo doesn’t seem to index my blog pretty much at all. Maybe that will change since I’m using MyBlogLog now, but all of my search traffic comes from Google. Does Yahoo play favorites when it comes to what blogs they will search since this one is Google hosted?
UPDATE: Stella was wondering why I would want my blog indexed. It’s a good question. I guess the easiest answer is that I want this to be a public blog to serve as a discussion with the public about things that I don’t mind for the most part being public information. I generally don’t talk about relationships, friends, etc… and much more of it is stuff that I want to have a public forum for.
I’m honestly hoping to start blogging better soon. I write a lot, but I don’t write well imho. Maybe someday.
Saul Williams has his new album coming out, “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!” at NiggyTardust.com but sadly, when Googling for Niggy Tardust, he is the 4th link. Looks like he needs some SEO going on. It’s amazing how good (and bad) some people are at that today. Apparently this blog does pretty well for certain queries, but I’m by no means a master of it. Hopefully after the launch of the album on the 1st, Google will get trained properly.
Update: He’s finally at the top of Google for searching “niggy tardust”.
I just came across a cool tool called Dashalytics, which is a Tiger OS X widget that interfaces with Google Analytics, so that you don’t have to go there and log in each time to look at your analytics. Very cool.
One of the best parts about it (testing this out now to see how well it works) is that it seems to let you load multiple widgets to check multiple accounts. This is nice since my blog (this) is on a different account than the ones that I keep an eye on for at Jazkarta.
