Google held its very first live chat last Friday which was extremely helpful and interesting. The Google Webmaster Help Team, who hosted the event, covered various aspects of search. But what I found to be the most intriguing was the presentation on image search optimization. More specifically was the fact that Google image search can extract signals such as color, texture, spatial layout, and over all quality of an image when indexing. Essentially they are “looking” at the image. This amongst other factors should be taken into account when working on your image search optimization efforts.

The live chat also gave a few other words of advice for image search optimization. Make sure that the images on your website have alt tags with relevant keywords and descriptive file names. Also, the text surrounding the image is being analyzed to determine image content. So, make sure that the header and paragraph text around the image is keyword targeted and relevant. And one last piece of advice for image search optimization is to make sure that when ever possible the image is hosted on your own site.

With images showing up more and more in regular search results it will be crucial to make image search optimization an important part of your SEO efforts.

Image search relevance is not something that we think about very often, but as Karen Umpierre noted recently, image search is getting smarter. Google can look inside images and tell the difference between faces and non-faces … well, usually. Occasionally a non-face slips in but it’s pretty impressive. This brings up the question of the future of search. Will there come a day when we won’t have to put 200 words of text on a page for it to rank well for relevance in a search query? The answer may be yes because new search engine technologies are emerging that take search into the images themselves. Instead of image search using text, we have visual search using images.

Maybe the most exciting new visual search idea is Nokia’s wireless Point & Find where a user just takes a picture and gets relevant information about the image based on information on the internet – including location, price, etc. While this is very much an emerging technology, it could very well change the way people shop. Imagine seeing some shoes you like at a party and being able to find them using your wireless device’s built-in search. Nokia claims this technology is at least three years away, but in the meantime, there are some visual search engines available now.

One that deserves special mention is Like.com because it is the first engine that is actually using visual search to help shoppers find what they want. For example, let’s say I want to buy some shoes. I go to the shoes section of Like.com and find a style that I like. Then I just click on the button marked Visual Search. This gives me a display of shoes that all resemble the shoes that I chose grouped by “overall matches”, “style matches”, “brand matches” and “color matches”. The most interesting aspect is the opportunity to refine my search by selecting a portion of the original image.

I just draw a box around the part of the image that I most want to match and Like.com gives me a new result. Like.com has just recently launched a new site after a lengthy beta period so we’re interested in seeing how well the new site is received. Will shoppers take to it? One problem may be that, as we noted with Google’s face search, the results aren’t perfect. For example, one of the top ten results for my search for matches to that spiky heel was this wedge heeled number. Of course, it is a high wedge – sort of spiky as wedges go and roughly the same shape as the heel of the shoe I selected so maybe this is just the visual search algorithm’s interpretation of my query. This brings me to the point of my post today – image relevance.

Just because a search engine uses a different point of reference (shape, color, style as opposed to words) doesn’t mean that we can stop worrying about relevance. If visual search becomes more prevalent, search engine optimization may actually become even more complicated with considerations of image quality, angle and other visually based factors coming to the fore. Furthermore, even Like.com relies on linguistic navigation to subsidize their product search and this is unlikely to change. So, if you were waiting around for the image search technology to get better before you optimized your site for keyword relevance, we would recommend that you not wait because whether it’s images or text, making your pages relevant to search queries will always matter.

It’s that time of the year again, April 1st a day when pranking and trickery are considered common place. The internet has always had these types of things but today is when it’s stepped up a bit and taken to an extreme through viral marketing efforts. Today I went to check my Gmail and came across Google’s April Fools trick about how we are now able to back date e-mails months into the past and make them look like they had been read. It was pretty funny but that’s to be expected of Google. I would highlight them but Google doesn’t need SEO. Continuing into my e-mail I had 2 new newsletters. One from Microsoft’s Xbox 360 site and one from a favorite shopping site of mine ThinkGeek.com.

Microsoft’s newsletter had some “new products” for spring which included a gaming helmet with “rumble” effects, an Xbox 360 made of wood, the Xbox 360 board game, and a Xbox 360 that came with a solar power tv and generator just incase the world ended and you needed power. Their items were unconvincing and were all done with computer graphics. Regardless of this fact I clicked through to see if there was any more effort put into their campaign. Clicking through the newsletter took me to this Xbox promotion page and although it is a very pretty page its total lack of text makes it useless for SEO. After clicking on one of the items in the flash movie the page tells you it’s a joke and to e-mail your friends and the campaign ends there. So what did Microsoft get from their viral marketing efforts? Not much. They managed to get 1 visit to an obscure promotion page and maybe a few e-mails out to my friends. They effectively drove traffic to a site that did nothing but generate traffic to a site with no conversion.

A better example is a personal favorite of mine ThinkGeek.com. Every year this site has a new April Fools viral marketing campaign and is known to be one of the best on the internet (You can see past year’s items here. Their entire home page is transformed by this campaign. Product pages, movies, and user images are all created to support it. Great items such as this Beta-Max to HD-DVD Converter or this USB Pregnancy Test are highlighted on their home page. The fake products that have movies are uploaded to YouTube where they spread like wildfire by un-expecting victims. Other are spread though word of mouth, blogs and message boards.

By this time tomorrow ThinkGeek can expect thousands of backlinks to these products by people who either thought they were funny, clever, or real. I can’t think of a better example of viral marketing that also translates into amazing SEO results. ThinkGeek has a PageRank of 8. This score is higher than Buy.com, Half.com, and Overstock.com. Through its creative marketing and SEO efforts this little niche ecommerce site has sky rocketed its self 1 PageRank away from the likes of Ebay.com and Amazon.com the 2 largest ecommerce sites on the internet.

Examples like this are proof that you can build relevant backlinks through viral marketing and social media. It doesn’t take a huge budget it just takes creative marketing efforts to enforce your SEO efforts.