Jeff Brooks (Donor Power Blog) had an interesting post a few days ago about the perils of using focus groups to inform marketing decisions. As Jeff rightly points out, “it’s not that people lie, it’s just that they don’t actually know what they think, so they try to help you out by making up answers.” I certainly agree that focus groups are problematic. Focus group questions are structured and the nature of the interaction is direct and personal, which skews results exactly as Jeff describes.

Of course, no research method (or testing protocol) is perfect, but the great big world of Web 2.0 provides some interesting new options. At RedBoots, we often turn to Buzz Monitoring, the process of monitoring what people say and do online without being prompted, to gain insight and understand how people talk about and advocate for issues and how information and ideas spread. Buzz Monitoring can provide powerful information. For example:

• What causes are getting the biggest share of the current conversation (read: interest) about the environment?
• Are conversations about global warming focusing more on the Bush administration, voluntary targets, or international treaties?
• Are people concerned about [pick a topic: mercury in fish, genetically modified foods, avian flu, etc.]? If so, what are the solutions that are most recommended or most often discussed?
• Is the conversation about obesity/diabetes/heart disease [pick a health topic] growing or waning in the months following our public education campaign?

As marketers, it is tempting to believe that we can “peg” donors (or customers, constituents, advocates, etc.) by measuring hard response to our “one to many” communications. The reality is that what happens outside of an organization’s direct communication with “the target audience” can be just as informative (if not more so) than response to an email, a direct mail piece, a click through on a paid search listing, etc.

So…the next time you hear someone talking about the ROI of social media, stop for a moment and think about some of the powerful, indirect applications of the social media phenomenon. Social media is more than a marketing tactic, and certainly more than a direct marketing tactic. The content created by Internet users (conversations with one another, video, blog posts, etc.) is a gold mine of information and insight into the world that lies beyond our contrived, direct interactions with “the target audience”.

Back in a former life, or at least that’s how long ago it seems, I was an object oriented programmer. Before your eyes glaze over, if they haven’t already, let me explain the basics before I get into how that’s relevant to SEO.

In an object oriented world everything is represented by an object, or an entity. So for example, an object could represent Dogs. Should you want to refine it further, you can do what’s called subclassing, and create an object under Dogs that represents Jack Russells, etc. But the real basic point that I want to ensure that you understand, is that an object represents only one type of an entity, and represents it to the best of its ability. There you go, that wasn’t too painful, was it?

So how does this relate to SEO? Well, if you consider that each page on your site could be considered an object, you want to make sure that each page only contains information about the topic at hand. For example, if you have a site on animals, you will want to have a separate page for Dogs. Should you want to refine it further, you could have a page on Jack Russells, etc. But why do you want to have only information about a particular topic on a page? Well, the Search Engine algorithms look for relevancy of the on-page items, as well as the incoming links. If your animal site talks about Giraffes, Marmosets and Jack Russells, how do they know what the main topic is? That’s why you need to break your site out into pages on each topic that you want to aim for. Breaking your site down into these topic specific pages and sub-topic specific pages allows you to really target keywords for each of your topics and sub-topics, with the search engines being able to know and understand the topic of each.

So just like in objects in Object Oriented programming, each page on your site should represent one entity, and do it well.

Including Jonathan Nicolas Tabbal, brand new baby of our friend and client Jennifer Tabbal (SOS Children’s Villages).

Congratulations to Jen and Nick on their beautiful baby boy! (That is the smallest pair of red boots we could find…they look enormous but he’ll grow into them, no doubt!)

The last SES show run by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman has finished. SES- San Jose closed out at 1.45pm PDT today, and most people have left town (there are training sessions tomorrow, but they’re an additional service beyond the main conference). I covered 12 sessions for this blog over the course of the conference (I attended 17, but decided against blogging the 2 keynotes, and the others were mostly due to laptop battery issues. Note to the conference organizers: a few power strips in the front row for the livebloggers would be a great idea).

The sessions I covered were:

• Public Relations Train Wrecks
• Universal and Blended Search
• Personalization
• One Billion Searchers
• Trademarks and Copyright Issues for Search Engines
• Videos and Search Engines
• Images and Search Engines
• Blogs and RSS Feeds
• So you want to be a Search Marketer?
• Pricing Models for SEM
• Issues in analytics
• Buzz Monitoring

There were, of course, many more sessions that I wasn’t able to attend, so if you’d like to read about those, you can go to:

Search Engine Roundtable where their tag team coverage meant that they were able to get most of the sessions written up.

Top Rank Blog, where a slightly smaller tag team covered a wide selection of the sessions.

Bruce Clay Blog, where a solo Lisa covered 17 of the sessions.

Continuing the live coverage of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007…

This is the last session of the last day, the topic is buzz monitoring, and the moderator is Chris Sherman.

The first presenter is Rob Key. Social Media is rapidly gaining SERP predominance, especially with blended / universal search. Search and social media have become fully intertwined.

The result is that you no longer own your brand, your brand is now a conversation. To understand the conversation, look below the waterline (the waterlne is the top 20-30 search results) . Look to Enterprise Generated Media, Mainstream Media, and User Generated Media. Below the waterline is blogs, newsgroups, podcasts, and other forms of CGM – this is ‘gold dust’ to companies.

Ask the key questions:

• Who is talking
• What are they saying
• Are you resonating with customers
• What’s the volume of the conversation, and who’s being impacted

What are core business uses?

• Reputation Management
• Customer Service
• New product launch
• Marketing Effectiveness
• Brand Management
• Sales & acquisition – look for affiliates / partners

What to mine?

• 70+ million blogs
• 90 million+ newsgroups
• Social networks
• Podcasts
• Q&A venues
• Other emerging CGM

Key mining dimensions

• WOM incidences
• Source
• Sentiment
• Topics
• Subtopics
• Tone
• Influence
• Depth of Understanding
• Existing versus ‘new’ voices

Look at the Conversation Leads – the influencers

Look at trending – trending provides greatest insights. Sentiment and perception change can be evaluated.

What is your reputation within search engine results for the most popular results?

Make it actionable:

Have a communication strategy to proactively and ethically in CGM

• Minimize competitors & determined detractors
• Engage the persuadable core audience
• Mobilize evangelists

Next up was Andy Beal.

Why should you track?

• Product ideas
• Product recalls
• Scandals
• Sentiment
• Trends
• News articles
• Competitive intelligence

What should you track?

• Anything related to your company from the company name to the executives.
• Track industry trends – moreover.com
• Most recent news – news.google.com
• News buzz – Digg
• Upcoming News – labs.digg.com/bigspy
• Blog posts – Technorati
• More blog posts – blogsearch.google.com
• Blog Comments – co.mments.com
• Blog Conversations – blogpulse.com/conversation
• Blog Trends – blogpulse.com/trend
• Bookmarks – del.icio.us/popular
• Photos – Flickr.com
• Videos – video.google.com
• Tags – keotag.com
• Forum posts – boardtracker.com
• Changing information – wikipedia.org – subscribe to the rss feed for a page
• Job Listings – Oodle
• SEC filings – google.brand.edgar-online.com
• Patents – google.com/patents
• Events – upcoming.yahoo.com
• New Products – amazon.com/tag/iphone
• Search queries
• Keyword referals – searchanalytics.compete.com
• Email updates – google.com/alerts
• The Untrackable – copernic.com
• Anything you want – pipes.yahoo.com

The last presenter of the conference is Jonathan Ashton, talking about reputation management, and how to defend your brand.

Search engines magnify the impact of a single voice. Millions invested in branding can vanish in an instance with one loud voice.

Buzz management= brand management

Look at ripoff report, my3cents.com, BBB.com, complaints.com, thesqueakywheel.com, consumeraffair.com. Brands need to monitor these sites.

The blog is really te soapbox of the new millenium.

Complaints to government agencies or litigation shows in SERPs.

Read te business book – Co-opetition – Brandenburger – helps those who are not harming your brand to place above the detractors.

Pay more for sponsor listings to push complaints below the fold (get a 3rd paid listing at the top of the page if you pay enough)

Optimize your contact page or customer care page- maximize your own site to run interference.

Help corporate siblings & cousins – send link popularity their way.

Co-opt job sites – make sure job postings are optimized, and pass link love to the job sites – Monster, etc

Maximize your PR – properly optimize your press releases and news stories. They will help to fill the space

Use wikipedia, that will usually show in the top 10…

Help accidental tourists, send link love to unrelated sites that can aid your space (do a bit of work for them, won’t detract from your brand, ad will again push the detractors below the fold)

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but you can reduce the impact of negative buzz with creative thinking and co-opetition.

…continuing the live RBDRodeo coverage of Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007.This session is all about the different issues with analytics, setup, challenges, etc, and is moderated by Alex Bennert.

The first speaker is John Marshall, with a presentation titled: The anatomy of a click – why tracking never matches”.

Assumptions

• PPC ad with tracking parameters
• Basically functional website
• Modern web analytics tool
• At some point you will need to understand why the numbers don’t match

This session will not cover

• ROI breakage
• Cookies and Cookie deletion
• Anything beyond the single, solitary, lone first click

Walking through the single click. Clicking on the PPC ad sends the URL to Google, for Google to redirect to the actual site (Google counts the click). At this point there’s the chance of a 1% chance of an error due to the browser dropping the redirect.

The browser then executes the redirect. This now gives another 1% chance of error due to DNS lookup errors.

If the site redirects to hide tracking URLs, using Javascript just gave you a 100% chance of an error.

When the browser requests the landing page. There’s a 5% chance of an error in log files due to cached pages for sites that set cookies.

Next, the browser renders the landing page, which can give you a 10% chance of an error when using javascript, and a 5% chance of an error when log file.

The more moving parts there are, the more chances there are of an error. The largest contributor to error is implementation of javascript. Logs are better for catching click fraud.

He then recommended the book “Fooled by Randomness” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Next up is Eric Enge (who handed out a copy of his Analytics players shoot off report).

Can you trust your data when analytics packages show different results?

He started off by walking through the report, showing charts to illustrate that the various packages al show different results, and there’s no consistency between the packages, one that counts high in one situation may not.

Sources of variance

• Bad or ambiguous data – Some data is thrown out. Packages make judgement calls
• Session tracking timeout – Industry standard is 30 minutes, some use 15 minutes. Is a new SE visit a new session?
• Many judgement call, implemented differently for each package

Sources of error

• Implementation problems
• Misunderstanding of terminology – Visit URL v Entry page URL
• Javascript placement – Issue is the delay before execution, users move on before JS executes, 1.4 second delay loses 2-4% of visits. Best practice: bottom of page

PPC tracking scenario

Cross check and calibrate – track your orders with other tools. Parameter on the URL for PPC viitors. Match up with orders on your backend

Focus on the strength of analytics – Keyword trending, etc

9 step recipe for success

1. Accept that analytics is not perfect
2. Know that trend analysis works
3. Eliminate implementation error
4. Learn the teminology of your vendor (may not be the same across all vendors)
5. Focus on the strength
6. Pick actionable KPIs
7. Measure Errors – cookie deletion rates, delay to javascript execution
8. Cross checkwith other tools and calibrate
9. Use judgement

Next up is Jonah Stein. Jonah has installed 3 tools on one website to show the differences between the packages. His presentation is titled “The best way to measure ROI”.

Objective of analytics: Rational basis for decision making to maximize ability to obtain campaign objectives.

Choosing a package

• Prices range fom zero to a lot
• Integration, testing and deployment ranges from hours to lots of hours
• Each package makes their own assumptions that affect results i.e. Clicktracks only captures revenue for the first transaction in a session.
• Results require interpretation

What do you compare?

• What is your baseline for comparison? Visits? Unique visitors? Page views?
• Conversions!!!

Be aware that different analytics packages may use different timescales (use GMT rather than EST).

Audit Conversions

• Unique identifier for each order
• Create 2 tables
• Join all that match
• Add all unique invoices from each table

Keyword Specific comparison auditing for PPC

• Join tables at the keyword level
• GA will not give you a keyword level report, Clicktracks will, as will IndexTools
• Look at each keyword, you’ll see a difference across the different packages

Conclusion

• Overall results are fairly close
• Tune analytics systems
• Follow the warning labels
• Analytics vendors do too much
• Analytics should not be relied on for ROI calculation

Best way to measure ROI

• Adwords conversion tracker with a 30 day cookie captured te most conversion
• Use a CRM system or orders – product database
• Save marketing data at the earliest touch
• Incentives to determine source at evey touch
• Capture campaign and keyword to your own cookie

Rounding out the presentation was the final speaker – Avinash Kaushik.  His presentation talked about the history of analytics, from logging to packet sniffers, to javascript.  Javascript is not the option that most people like

People are not paying for web analytics, not because of the free tools, instead it’s because of silos – a lack of business data integration, there is also a general lack of perceived ROI.

So where are we? We are in the very early stages of analytics.

Overview single soundbite for each vendor

• Omniture – Beyond clickstream analysis, automated Action “taking” – bundled data warehouse
• Webtrends – Marketing optimization, give us your search spend – bundled data warehouse
• Visual Sciences – HBX: Custom excel reports, God’s gift to analysis
• CoreMetrics – Got Retail?  Lifetime Individual Visitor Experience
• Indextools – Custom reportig, anything by anything, Enterprise for the cost of little
• Clicktracks – Ease of Use, Unleashing the power of segmentation
• Unica – Custom reporting, multichannel campaign tracking
• Microsoft – Visual, free, demographic segmentation
• Google Analytics – Data Democracy, Best of breed search analysis

The WAA has released today 26 new Web analytics Definitions to attempt to standardize terminology.

…continuing the live blogging from Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007.

The third session of the third day is on the topic of SEM pricing, and is moderated by Misty Locke.

First up is Rand Fishkin.

Pricing must take into account the fact that there are many different services:

• Site auditing reports
• Standard consulting
• Keyword ranking
• Keyword research reports
• Content creation and copyrighting
• Link building
• Strategic planning and design
• Viral marketing (link bait creation)
• Social media marketing
• Reputation management and control
• Brand tracking and reporting
• Web development and web design
• Training and workshops.

Pricing model

• Hourly consulting – $100 to $400 per hour
• Monthly retainers
• By the project pricing
• Pay per performance
• Profit Sharing
• Hybrid models

Rand then went through some examples of pricing for past customers.

One of the biggest challenges is scalability. Therefore SEOmoz decided to go into products as well as services. It’s a one time investment with a long term return on investment.

Next up is Lance Loveday. His first point is to make sure that you price an engagement appropriately, otherwise you may find that you’ll be making a loss based on the amount of work that you’ll need to do.

Pricing goals

• Charge what the market will bear
• In line with client expectations
• Minimize risk
• Maximize upside
• Rationally justifiable
• What works best for the client

Fees are determined by:

• Scale of campaign
• new v existing
• International
• Geo-targeting
• PITA factor
• Size of client
• Est. Time

Management fees are determined by:

• Scale of Campaign
• International
• PITA factor
• Size of client
• Estimated Time

- His setup fees are usually 2-3x the monthly management fees.

Next up is Ken Jurina.

He lists 4 typical industry models

• Retainer 2k – 50k per month
• Pay per performance % of sales / leads / etc
• Fee for Service – $2500 – $1 million +, project based with finite scope
• Hourly Consultation – $30 to $1000 per hour

Do a SWOT analysis, find out what work you really want to do. Choose service offerings. Price what the market is willing to bear. For new firms, price to cover expenses / how much you need to live. Know your market and your competition. Don’t accept every client. Mid size clients seem to be the best companies to work with. Pricing is different based on the location of your customers.

Have proper detailed proposals, with the work outlined with the pricing.

The last speaker is Mike Murray. He lists some pros ad cons of performance based models, custom fee models, hourly models, and the fixed annual retainer, with the annual contract providing the best value.

If you’re consistent with the model, then it becomes much easier to manage multiple clients, easier for everyone to understand and easier for you to scale the business.

Another live blogging report from Search Engine Strategies – San Jose 2007

This session is on what you need to know to be a search marketer, and is moderated by Misty Locke.

First up is Pradeep Chopra, talking about the opportunities that are available in the industry.

The internet has created a level playing field, independent of

• time
• distance
• capital

The SEM industry is growing at an incredible pace, making this the best time to be an SEM professional.

Why a career in SEM?

• Skills are portable
• Flexibility: Anytime, anywhere
• Innovation and adventure
• You don’t need a professional degree
• Salaries are attractive
• Entry level salaries – 30-45k
• Specialist 50-75k
• Expert 75-90k
• Director 95-150k
• VP – 300k+

What skills do you need?

• Comunication
• Passion about the internet
• Networking
• Quick learner
• SEO – Technical, HTML, Optimization
• PPC – Creative (copy writing), analytical & quantitative
• Sales & Marketing

The future:

• Web2.0 – social networking
• Rich media advertising
• Behavioral advertising
• Conversions / Analytics
• Beyond US

Hot Verticals

• Retail
• Travel
• Finance
• Education
• Social networking
• SEM

Key to success:

• Use SEM
• Continuous Learning – Certification
• Leadership Role – Teams are expanding, Ability to apply SEM

Next up – Dan Perry who is going to talk about the interview process.

Expect to meet with at least 3 people

• HR – did you lie on the resume?
• Boss – can you do the job
• Boss’ Boss – Corporate fit

Prepare for the generic questions.

Interview Process

• Never bring up money
• Don’t say you have offers elsewhere
• Don’t ask for more vacation
• Know your number and stick to it
• Consider the entire package – insurance, relocation, 401k, etc
• Ask questions
• Be specific – no culture questions

Final thoughts

• Be prepared to compromise
• Develop Diplomacy

Next up David Wallace. He advises using free resources such as blogs and forums. Paid eBooks, online courses, conferences and seminars. But hands on is the best way to get experience. If you don’t have a site, go set one up to play with. Pick a niche, secure a domain name, and establish the website. Then optimize and play with the site.

Network with not only partner, but other search marketers. Develop business partnerships – ad agencies, web design firms, etc. Network online with search marketers – forums, blogs, social media sites. Network in real life with everyone – conferences, trade shows, etc.

Brand yourself as an expert:

• Write informative articles
• Participate in forums
• Participate in Social Media
• Start an informative blog

Things not to do

• Don’t spam forums and/or blog comments
• Don’t steal content or sales copy from others
• Don’t be a know-it-all
• Don’t promise more than you can deliver

Michael Gray is up to talk about the common mistakes

• Promise what you can deliver
• Set reasonable expectations
• Set reasonable limits – how much time you’ll be spending with that client. Avoid the temptation to bcome the defacto in-house SEM
• Disclose any potential conflicts.
• Avoid competing with your clients
• Don’t let your business depend one one client
• Don’t expose your clients websites to unnecessary risks
• Pick and follow your favorite blogs. Limit yourself to a handful
• Use recap or roundup bloggers
• Use subcontractors to scale up/down quickly
• Use subcontractors to compensate for areas that aren’t your strengths
• Be carfeul using subcontractors for mission critical functions
• Know when you need and don’t need a contract
• Large companies won’t work without a contract
• Understand “work for hire” and copyright.
• Get a good accountant
• Learn how to use accounting to your benefit
• A good accountant will save you more money that you are paying them each year.

The last speaker is Jessica Bowman. She advises reading Google Hacks to learn the in and outs of search functionality, as well as Shari Thurow’s newly revised book (released today). Find the blogs of the speakers you liked.

Don’t be afraid to outsource portions of a project to more advanced search marketers.

At a minimum read Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable & Sphinn daily.   Keep on top of changes in SEM.  Expect to spend 2 hours per day readin, just to keep in touch with the market.

As you work, systematize and document your process for consistency and productivity.  You will have gaps between client meetings, organizing helps.  Outsourcing becomes easier.  Productivity increases.  Document your rankings, keyword data gathering, competitive link data, directory submissions, portions of a site audit, optimization Q&A.

Once again – Network, build industry camaraderie.

Another live blogging post from Search Engine Strategies – San Jose.

This session is on blogs and RSS feeds, and is moderated by Rebecca Lieb.

The first presenter was Stephan Spencer.

Optimizing your RSS feeds

• Full text feeds, not summaries
• 20 or more items
• Multiple feeds – category, comments, comment by post, links, photos, etc
• Keyword rich title
• Brand name in the title
• Your most important keyword in the title
• Compelling description tag
• Don’t put tracking codes in the URLs
• An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories and engines

Optimizing your blog

Rejig your internal linking structure

• Tag clouds and tag pages
• Related posts
• top 10 posts
• next and previous posts

Build inbound links

• Add technorati tags to your posts
• Get onto other bloggers’ blogrolls
• Trackbacks and comments won’t help with link gain

Recommends “Ultimate Tag Warrior”, “SEO title tag”, “Sticky Posts” and “Popularity Contest” plugins for WordPress blogs.

Build author profile pages.

Next up Rick Klau to discuss feedburner.

• Syndication is increasingly popular
• Social networks encourage feed distribution
• Feedburner’s “pro” features are now free (total stats, myBrand)
• Yahoo! Pipes – customizing RSS
• Sitemaps support feeds

MyBrand allows you to map a CNAME to feeds.feedburner.com – need DNS skills to do so.

Track your readership through Feedburner. Know where and what your readers are reading.

Again, use full feeds rather than partial feeds. You need to get your full, keyword rich content out there.

You can noindex to keep your feed out of the index. As well as from the robots.txt file.

Auto-discovery advertises your feed’s availability to browsers and bots.

• Simplifies the subscription process for many browsers.
• Accelerates discoverability of feed for automated services

Know which services know you – look at the bots that have accessed your feed.

Add show notes for podcasts. Gives content and context for the search engines.

Leverage social networks for more distribution – i.e. Facebook will allow you to import your blog feed.

Next up Doug Hay.

RSS is great on a blog, but it’s just as powerful on web content.

Why is RSS a good SEO strategy?

• Increases the rate of change
• Adds more optimized content to your site
• Reaches new and niche markets
• Drives more qualified traffic to your site
• Provides more inbound links

If you’re putting out press releases, put them out on RSS feeds as well as the PR services.

You can use RSS feeds for product information – articles on the product.

RSS can be used for consumer education articles, destination information, etc.

Again, make sure to add social media tagging.

Greg Jarboe started off talking about how easy it used to be. Now there are 93.8 million blog worldwide, with only 100 million websites.

He then showed a case study of a company that doesn’t blog, but benefits from blogs.

Keyword research was the first step. Look for emerging terms i.e. “Windows Vista Activation”.

Next he talked about the BuzzLogic tool to map the influential bloggers in the conversation.

He invited the top 40 influential bloggers and journalists to an online meeting. 8 of them attended. 15 of the targeted bloggers wrote about the story over the next 6 days. 155,681 unique visitors that week. 64,370 more than the previous record.

3,528 new subscriptions a week, 1,800 more than the previous record.

So you don’t need to have a blog to get the benefits, you just have to know how to leverage blogs.

Continuing my live coverage of Search Engine Strategies San Jose 2007…

This session is on Images and Search Engines and is moderated by Anne Kennedy.

First up was Shari Thurow reviewing SEO techniques: Keywords, architecture, interface & Links.

All engines look at title tags, body copy, text at the top of the page, and in and around hypertext links.

As a rule web pages that contain both primary and secondary text will rank better than sites with just secondary text. Get content on the page, not images. Use CSS to replace graphics where possible.

Approx. 15-16% of all searches are for images. Search engines interpret a jpg to be a photo. A gif is seen to be a graphic image. Search Engines examine the text around an image for context. Make sure to name your graphic images correctly, the name counts. Use captions or labels to provide contextual cues for search engines. Optimize the entire page. Do your keyword research. Minimize download time (compression and dimensions).

Next up, Li Evans, talking about blended search (Google Universal Search). Image search is still the fastest growing vertical search. Searchers and shoppers are visual, they want to see it before they buy it.

Opportunities:

• Hot products
• Niche markets
• Comparison shopping
• Blended Search
• Reputation Management

Yesterday a search for Hurricane Dean had no images, today, there is a thumbnail picture displayed. The speed of change is fast.

Add images into the sitemap.

Your images form an impression of your brand, product or service. What do your images say about you?

Next up Chris Silver Smith. He’s talking about the potential value of social image sharing sites. The best one for SEO is Flickr, with 23 and Fotki having good optimization features. Photobucket has great PR, but does not have the ability to optimize the images.

The design of Flickr is advantageous for SEO. You can add Titles, H1, Captions, there are tags, cross grouping, comments, sharing, alt text, optimal linking hierarchies, date taken page views displayed, and an interestingness algorithm.

Make sure you have good quality pictures. pictures with good contrast tend to work better. Be broad in experimenting with subject matter for pictures intended to drive traffic and conversion.

How to optimize for Flickr

• Add a unique title
• Add a description
• Tag your image with keywords
• make photos publicly viewable
• Consider loose licensing for your pictures (share them)
• Geotag the image if appropriate
• Look for groups for groups that thematically match with yours
• Share pictures with news agencies
• Post as many pictures as possible to Flickr
• Add a note into the region ofthe photo
• Post to Del.icio.us as well

Add photos to your business trough Google maps.

2 new query parameters &imgtype=face gives you faces

Chris Pierry from Yahoo talked about the poor job that search engines are doing with images, so they need to have high quality optimized images. They are looking at social networks for images. The image should be unique.

James Jeude of Ask came up next and spoke about making sure that if your site is very fast moving you should try to get inserted and highly ranked as a news / blog source in the major aggregators. Make sure to have iconic images clearly labeled and attractive enough to get links from others.

Make sure that your site is “web search friendly” as a co-requisite to “image search friendly”

Be clear and direct in the popular terms but add qualifiers if possible to reward the skilled searcher.

Put your misspellings ad synonyms in the metatags.