Google Analytics Displays Traffic from Image Search

Why Care About Image Search?

Optimizing your images with file names and good alt tag descriptions is another easy way to let Google know the theme of your web pages, which in turn improves rankings.  The result: more visitors!

Here’s what you need to know. The first three points are considered critical to improving image search rankings.

POINT ONE - Clear Alt Tag Text That Describes the Image

Alt Attribute tags should describe the image in a simple manner. Use the keywords that are relevant to the image description, and where possible, the Alt tag should include the keyword phrase the page is optimized for. By that I mean the keyword is used in the Title tag, within page content, and is used in links pointing to the page.

While the Alt tag doesn’t contribute very much to ranking in Google’s main index, Google is suggesting it helps a lot in image search.

POINT TWO - Image Relevance to Page Content

It may go without saying but the image should be relevant to the text content on the page.  Where possible include descriptive text or captions on the page shown near the image, as that also helps Google understand what the image is about.  This descriptive text should contain the same keywords used in the Alt tag and file name.

It also helps when providing a link to a full-size image to do this:  “Click here for full size image of Polycom Speakerphone” — instead of “Click for full size” or “enlarge”.

POINT THREE - Descriptive File Name

File name of Image:  Where possible the file name should include your relevant keyword.  For example, a file name like such as — DSC1232.jpg — doesn’t tell Google anything useful about the image.  Use dashes or underscores in the file name to separate words.

Do this: Improve-Image-Search-Rankings.gif

Don’t do this: imagesearch.gif

POINT FOUR - Image Properties

Images should be optimized for fast download times and specify the image height and width in pixels in the HTML.

POINT FIVE - Allow for Indexing

Believe it or not but some sites exclude search bots from indexing.  Allow engines to index your /images directory.

Check out Matt Cutts Video on Image Search

What’s The Big Deal About Video?

Google is in beta with software that will translate the words spoken in a video to text that can be indexed by search engines. The SEO implications are enormous. Once this technology is perfected, it will allow video content to be found in the search engines based on the spoken words in the video.

But wait, there’s more…

Google/TechTarget Survey

A collaborative survey between Google and Tech Target confirms that there is a big opportunity for companies providing video content to further engage with IT customers during their product research cycle. The survey concludes that IT buyers are showing a growing interest in video content as a means of educating themselves during the buying process.

What the Survey Tells Us About Using Video to Engage With Customers

• 55% of survey respondents report that video content would be very useful in educating themselves about products and services they were researching, with the intent of buying.

• 59% report watching video on YouTube, manufacturer, and content publisher’s sites. Watching video on vendor sites trailed far behind these choices, suggesting that vendor sites could see higher rates of use if they featured relevant video content.

• 41% report that they prefer product demos to be less than 5 minutes in length. Attention spans are short, requiring companies to get to the point quickly.

Jim Rodgers of SFO Design suggests video conveys complex ideas and technologies faster than a white paper.  Rodgers suggests that a 2 minute video introducing a technical white paper can significantly increase white paper download rates.

Try it for Yourself - Watch the videos on these 3 sites and see if you come away with enough of an understanding of their products to spend more time on the site.

• PowerPorts
• Serious Materials
• Arista

Getting Your Video Out There

Try publishing your video on Tube Mogul - a video analytics and distribution company that makes it easy to get published.

And in true Web 2.0 style - don’t forget to Twitter about your new video.

Your company may not have jumped on the Social Media bandwagon yet but that hasn’t stopped your customers, prospects and even employees from talking (AKA tweeting) about you.

It’s often an eye-opener for companies to find that even though they aren’t participating on Twitter - their customers are.

What do people say about your company on Twitter?  Let’s find out:

Go to: search.twitter.com and run a search of your company name, your product names, and even your CEO’s name. Scan the posts for anything that you can reply to or follow up on.

Forrester is one of the best examples of Twitter in the B2B environment

If you want to get started with Twitter and aren’t sure where to start, begin by following Forrester. Go to: http://twitter.com/forrester and click on the follow button (it’s not very obvious) that is directly below their logo.

Get The Stats

If you use Twitter and your Tweets contain URLs, you can track click activity with TwitClicks. I used to use TinyURL to create short URLs for posting on Twitter (Twitter can only accommodate 140 characters per Tweet) so using TwitClicks means a switch for me but I like all the data I get. They also provide a great demo video (you don’t even have to read) to learn how it works.

This is a great way for B2B companies who do use Twitter to post webinars, product launches - or anything really - and see if visitors follow that link.

Twitter is to Social Media what Google Alerts is to Web 1.0 Marketers - A Reputation Management Tool

Initially for B2B companies, I couldn’t justify including Twitter as part of a Phase One strategy into Social Media Marketing but now it’s part of my Reputation Management check-up.

A Word About How Twitclicks Passwords Work

The way TwitClicks works is through you existing Twitter account.  It doesn’t store any passwords, but requires your Twitter password in order to log in and perform the Twitter communications for the session.  For this reason, the system can’t email your  login details because it doesn’t store anything except your twitter username.  If you’ve forgotten your Twitter login, there’s a “forgot your password” feature on the Twitter website.

How have you used Twitter in the corporate environment?

Yesterday I had a taste for one of those delicious Noah Bagels with the cream cheese and smoked salmon.  I thought I’d pick up lunch while I was running other errands.

And that’s where the trouble began!

I wanted to find the closet bagel shop to REI so I went to www.noahs.com looking for store locations. Silly me - you would think that Noah’s would make it real simple to get me to their physical location given that you can’t order a bagel online.  Right?

No way… after a frustratingly long wait for the homepage to load I’m presented with more silly animation and a coffee cup that follows my mouse.

I suspect Noahs spent somewhere between $50K to $100K for this website yet it doesn’t serve up bagels in a way that I care to repeat.

Using the stop watch on my iPhone I compared the time it took to gather store location info for the stores I was planning to visit.

1. 35 seconds:   Noahs.com
2. 28 seconds:   LongsDrugs.com *see note below
3. 18 seconds:   CrateandBarrel.com
4. 16 seconds:   REI.com
5. 11 seconds:   Macys.com

While your own results may vary depending on your bandwidth, finding this information on Noah’s site took over 3 times as long as the fastest website.

* Longs Drug Store gave me an Google Maps API error message when I clicked on Store Locator that said “The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site.”

For SEO Geeks: Being a search engine optimization consultant, I wanted to see how Google was interpreting Noah’s site content.   A check in Google’s Cache for the homepage brings up information about the Flash player instead of website content - because of course there was no site content.

The Title tag is simply “Noahs Bagel Home”.  For more examples of how NOT to optimize your site - do a <site:noahs.com> search and look at all Noah’s Title tags - they are equally weak.   I suspect that Google is ranking Noah’s website on the first page of a search for “bagels” because of its inbound links and not because of content on the website.

Once again, the site fails to meet the audience needs of the search bots!  What were they thinking?

I hope getting served in the real world Noah’s location won’t be as slow and frustrating as using their website!

Many of our B2B clients are now engaging in Web 2.0 Social Media Marketing. The problem is that it’s overwhelming - even the terminology sounds like a foreign language.

Another hurdle is that marketing measurement tools don’t apply in gauging success of the initiative.

We recommend that clients start with a few basic Web 2.0 strategies to help them understand the power of social marketing. B2B is hard to measure so we have selected strategies that have some measurable component.

GETTING STARTED: B2B SOCIAL MEDIA

WIKIPEDIA

Build a page about your corporation and include links to highly targeted pages on your site. Warning! You must first read the Wikipedia content guidelines and strictly adhere to them or risk having your new page deleted by the editors.

Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from Wikipedia. Our experience is people from Wikipedia stay longer and view more pages than your typical visitor.

LINKEDIN

Build a company page using LinkedIn’s new Company beta feature. Request that the top management in your company also create LinkedIn profiles. This content gets indexed in search engines and can have a positive impact on your search rankings.

Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from LinkedIn and rankings.

LAUNCH A BLOG WITH RSS FEED

It’s a technically easy place for most clients to start. The biggest drawback being what to write about and who is in charge of this initiative. We suggest that one employee dedicate 4 to 6 hours per week to the blog and to posting on other appropriate blogs.

Measurement: Improvement in Inbound links,  blog page views, blog posts and trackbacks.

CREATE VIDEO AND PODCASTS

Even the amateur video files in YouTube can get thousands of visits! I suggest adding video and/or podcasts to your site and submitting them such as Feedburner, YouTube, and even iTunes.

Measurement: Most of these sites offer measurement information.  TubeMogul - a video publishing and analytics website - is a great resource that let’s video owners publish and track video useage (basic service is free).

ADD TAGGING CAPABILITIES

All our clients seem to have a library of content and we recommend that they add the “share/book” links.

Measurement: Occasionally check to see the number of bookmarks.  For example:

• Delicious.com: Under the Bookmarks tag do a look-up for your company URL and track the number of times pages from your site have been bookmarked and had notes written about it. (The notes can be very interesting to read as well)

TWITTER

Think of Twitter as a broadcast mechanism and the rest is easy. Use it to alert your followers about new blog posts, events, or your latest video.  The hardest part is fitting the message into 140 characters.

Measurement: While measuring “Followers” is an easy metric - it’s not as reliable as you’d like it to be. What you want to have happen is for people to ReTweet (RT) your posts.

Do you know which website content captures site visitors interest? Earlier this year I tested a tool called Crazy Egg that displays clicks as “heat maps” and now I can’t live without it!

CrazyEgg Heat Map Plans start at $9.00/month

Let’s Compare CrazyEgg to Google Analytics: While Google Analytics is hard to beat as an easy-to-use analytics tool I’ve found that our clients can more easily grasp the visitors intent when they see the page in the “Heat Map” view.

Initially I was excited by the data from Google Analytics. Their Site Overlay function measures and highlights the links that visitors click on. Unfortunately, without additional coding Site Overlay can’t distinguish the difference between a visitor clicking on a “Services” link in the main navigation versus a click on the “Services” link in my page footer.

What I really needed was the whole picture without having to depend on our client’s web developer to make additional changes for us. Previously this took too long to implement when I wanted to run a quick test of new content or design elements.

What Did I Learn from CrazyEgg Reporting? I can now instantly see the content that visitors are most interested in on some of the most important pages of a website and did I learn a lot!

• Visitors clicked on images that were not intended to be links. This meant we had to go back and recode the image files for graphs, logos, etc. so that we wouldn’t lose visitors when they were interested in specific content that wasn’t a hyperlink.
• Visitors clicked on links in the footer area - way below the fold! In the past we have been using footer site maps (see example footer site map on this page) as a way of improving search engine rankings but now we see that visitors actually use those links. That’s good to know.

What Do I Use It For?

1. Testing new designs or design elements on a specific page - the software allows you to retain previous tests so it’s easy to compare.
2. Testing “Calls-To-Action” call-outs - test click activity between graphic and text links.
3. Testing content - the software indicates visitor and click counts so it’s easy to see changes in a given time period.

CrazyEgg Drawbacks: The software doesn’t do a good job of tracking click activity for Flash elements and fancy JavaScript, and many of our clients’ homepages contain Flash. The reports can take 1-5 minutes to generate and it can feel like an eternity.

Customer Service: I have to applaud the company for its prompt response in handling all my requests since I started using their product. They’ll actually talk to you on the phone and reply promptly to emails.

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WHAT DO THE REPORTS LOOK LIKE?

Heat Mapping Technology: Previously this type of reporting capability was expensive and required skill in setting up a test. But now, in ten minutes, you can be set up and gathering data..

Click Activity Bubble: This is a cool view because you can see which areas have the highest click activity by the color of the circle associated with each link. And, if you roll over or click on the circle you see the actual number of clicks.

There’s several other report styles but these are my favorite versions.

Set Up Tricks: To start tracking visitors you need to add a piece of JavaScript to the page you would like to track. I’ve found the easiest thing to do is to add it to all pages of a site and then once in the interface, you can determine which pages you want to track.

For more reports and information, visit CrazyEgg

Google Webmaster Tools provides valuable insights into what is happening on your website, information that you either can’t get anywhere else or have to spend a lot more time figuring out.

It’s a free tool from Google.

DIAGNOSTICS: Web Crawl Errors

We all want the search engines to find and index ALL the pages on our website, right?  Okay, sometimes there are certain pages we want to hide and we can always exclude the bots from those pages with listings in our robots.txt file. But by and large we want our web pages to show up in Google and Yahoo. After all, that’s where our site visitors come from, the search engines!  However, linking errors inside our site, or link errors on other sites, can result in the bots not finding important pages on our site.

The web crawl error list below shows you where the problems are so you can go about fixing them. It will tell you if the errors are http related, or 404 related, or are unreachable for some reason: it’s really a very complete list. And it sure beats you spending the time to manually click all the links in your site to make sure they work!

Does Google get something out of this? Of course they do! Google wants to be sure it finds ALL the content on your site, and this tool makes it more likely site owners will fix the problems Google finds.

It’s a win-win.

DIAGNOSTICS: Content Analysis

“Content Analysis” sounds more sophisticated than it actually is, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. Here Google looks at your title and meta description tags to see if you have duplicate tags, or if the tags are too short or too long. Again, self-interest is at work: Google wants all site owners to have useful, descriptive tags because the engines rely on your tag to help them understand your site content. And since you want the engines to correctly understand your site content, you do want to know if your tags are anything less than optimal!

STATISTICS: Top Search Queries

Now things really get interesting. This tool tells you what words visitors entered into Google (search terms) that led them to your site!  This is extremely useful data which you can use to improve your site and learn what subjects your visitors are interested in.

The data is divided into two categories: “Impressions” and “Traffic”. The first category is search terms that Google displayed your site as a search result; the second is the search terms that resulted in searches actually arriving at your site. Note the distinction. If there are terms in the Impressions list that don’t show up in the Traffic list, and you feel you should be getting visitors for those Impressions terms, then you need to improve the content on your site that relates to those terms as well as make sure the title and meta description tags on those pages are compelling and accurate.

As usual, your efforts are going to benefit Google as well, allowing it to better understand and describe your site content to searchers.

STATISTICS: What Googlebot Sees

Googlebot is the automated software used by Google to “crawl” and index the web. This data tells you the text of the links that point to your site from other sites. Remember that the text of external (or “inbound”) links to your site is used by Google to help rank your site! Ideally the link text should include important keywords on the page it is linking to, as that will help the pages rank in Google.

STATISTICS: Crawl Stats

Here you can see how often the Googlebot is visiting your site and how many pages it crawls. I find it rather amazing how frequently the bot comes back to a site to make sure it isn’t missing anything new. You can, to a limited extent, control how often Google crawls your site by values used in your XML sitemap file.

STATISTICS: Index Stats

This is a very useful page with shortcuts to Google’s Advanced Search feature. You can learn how many pages on your site are in Google’s index; how many links on other sites point to a page on your site (this is an approximate figure), and what content on your site is in Google’s cache, and other sites that Google considers “similar” to yours. Use that information to find competitors and then see how they rank in Google for search terms that are important to you.

LINKS

The data in this section expands somewhat on the Index Stats data. Here you can see: which pages on your site are linked to from other sites; which pages on your site Google might show in search results; and which pages on your site are linked internally (to each other).

SITEMAP

A Google sitemap is a very useful tool that you can use to communicate directly with the specific Google search bot that contains specific information about your site. In it you can list all the URLs you want to be sure the bot finds and indexes, assigns priorities to different URLs, and indicate how frequently you want Google to revisit your site.