Renegade Search

Something that consistently presents a challenge to SEO professionals is striking the balance between optimizing a website for search engines while maintaining effective on-page optimization for user experience. More often than not, a website will do one very well and neglect the other. The question arises, “If you could delegate your resources for optimizing a site for only search engines or humans, which is the better approach?” My immediate response to such a question has in the past been - what is the purpose of having a beautiful, user friendly website if nobody can find it in the first place? And while there may be substance behind that line of reasoning in certain situations, the issue is far more complex than that and such a reaction doesn’t capture the breadth of the problem.

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If your business is currently engaged in an SEO campaign, than its safe to say that you periodically check your search engine rankings for some of your more competitive terms. It's great to keep an eye on your organic rankings, but what if I told you that the rankings you are looking at for your site might not be accurate? That's right, the search results you view on your personal computer could be different if you have visited any of the websites that are showing up.

This is due to personalized search: Google tweaking search results on an individual basis due to user's internet history. This might be great for the average search engine user, but it is of zero help when you are trying to manually check your rankings. With a simple change in your Chrome browser settings you can permanently get rid of this headache and start seeing search results as they should be - depersonalized.

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Given the recent high-profile launch of Google+, it's clear that the biggest player in the search space is making good on their commitment to social media as a major component for search results moving forward. If the buzz across other social media sites isn't enough of a sign that Google+ is worth paying attention to, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has gone on record stating that all Google products and services will eventually be completely integrated with Google+.

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For anyone who spent too much time in their formative years learning how to photoshop pictures of themselves or their friends into embarrassing or funny situations, Google Image Search has been a blessing. In my younger days, I could count Image search whenever I needed to find a picture of a celebrity, movie poster, or historical event that would be the perfect kickstart for an inside joke that I'd spend around four hours on and would only make sense to at most three people. I did this often. (I had a lot of free time.)



But Image Search can also be used for legitimately useful purposes. On sites where a large amount of the content is visual (such as image hosting sites, art galleries, celebrity photo sites, and more), it can often make more sense to target potential users via Image Search than traditional channels. And even when a site isn't completely 'visual', there are always plenty of opportunities to draw traffic using Image SEO.

Every type of non-traditional SEO, from Blog Optimization to Video Optimization, has its own set of best practices and rules. Image search is, of course, no exception to this rule. For the rest of this post, I'm going to go over a few of the most basic best practices for Image SEO.

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