Clicksharp Marketing

Is your website graphics-intensive? Every website should have at least some image content — even a business whose core product or service is inherently averse to representation with photos or artwork. Apart from presenting the visitor with a more aesthetically-pleasing experience, it makes sense from an SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) perspective.

An August 2007 post from Elliance entitled “Six Simple Steps To Image Optimization” illustrates how this is done:

(Step #6, “Use photo sharing sites” will be dealt with in Part 2 of this discussion.)

This can work across the board, for example:

• Photographers, whose image content tends to draw more attention than their words
• Retailers, whose product images can often rank better in image search than traditional search
• Service professionals (e.g. consultants, brokers), whose face recognition may be just as important as name recognition
• And many other types of businesses — ask us if it’s right for you.

One underappreciated benefit of image search optimization is that while SEO has become more popular, people still tend to apply it to the primary search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. But image search, still largely untapped as a target for good SEO, represents an opportunity for small businesses to leap right past larger competitors.

Furthermore, the programs that determine ad placement in search and content networks will often use image content as a determinant of landing page relevancy. Translation: optimized images help you manage advertising expenditure and boost conversion rate.

Finally, when considering how to further implement image content on your site, consider a few other uses:

• It’s an opportunity to plaster your brand name in whatever context you choose — how about superimposing it on a map of the city where you do business?
• Present visitors with a graph or flow chart which articulates your company’s core competency? (You can do this in Powerpoint and export it as an image for easy embedding in your website.)
• Use hyperlinked images of partners’ logos to build goodwill and promote the large scope of your business relationships.

A final note: don’t overdo it. A website that loads slowly conveys a poor user experience which far outweighs the benefits of this imagery — and the business implications of this will only become more profound.

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Paul Burani

Clicksharp Marketing

New York, NY

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 @ 9:42 am on the category Pay-per-click advertising, SEM, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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