The short answer is the Wikimedia Foundation created a white hat opportunity for SEO to generate outgoing links via image uploads. The strategy hinges on a copyleft licensing option called CC-by-sa, and the decision isn’t accidental. They’re glad to trade some link love in return for quality content. Or, as Wikimedia communications committee member David Gerard puts it, “Releasing control over your stuff is hard. But consider the advantage of having a picture that isn’t a blurry, red-eyed piece of suck.” I chuckled at those words until I viewed the link David supplied as an example. Really, Emmy-winning actor Richard Schiff ought to have a portrait at his biography that looks better than the one on his driver’s license.

Guys, if your wife or girlfriend is the jealous type it may be wise to wait until she leaves the room before opening this next link. One celebrity who gets the idea is Michele Merkin, who hosted The Next Best Thing on ABC last spring.

There’s an important detail on that page if you can pry your eyes away from Michele for a moment. Have a look at that gold star in the far upper right corner: Wikipedia calls this a featured picture. Yes, the lady has brains. Michele is the first celebrity to gain featured picture status at Wikipedia by releasing a professional portrait under copyleft license. Readers of my last column won’t be surprised to learn this has earned her publicity at some high level Wikipedia articles.

• Beauty
• Glamour photography
• Physical attractiveness

By releasing high quality portraiture and gaining featured picture status, Michele’s image will probably be durable at all three of those pages. Featured pictures almost always are the winners in editorial debates about how to illustrate an article. That’s great… erm… exposure for her.

Another benefit that goes to featured pictures is a day on Wikipedia’s main page. I’ll crunch a few numbers to demonstrate how valuable that is. Recently I was on Alexa tooling around with their search function to see what a monster Wikipedia had become. You’ll either love these stats or hate them.

• Wikipedia: traffic rank 9
• Nytimes.com: traffic rank 216
• Wallstreetjournal.com: traffic rank 1,098
• Britannica.com: 4,097

If you combined all three of those venerable publications they’d bring about one tenth the traffic at Wikipedia, which gets 40 million unique visitors a month. 52% of the overall traffic goes to the English language edition where the most popular destination is the main page. According to Cary Bass of the Wikimedia Foundation, that page gets 3 million total hits a day.

All of this points to one simple conclusion: in late 2007 a scroll-down spot on Wikipedia’s main page is considerably more valuable than below the fold placement on the front page of The New York Times. If your goal is publicity then Wikipedia’s main page is a great place to be. Hardly anyone in the business community has tapped this opportunity yet. Most of Wikipedia’s pictures of the day are amateur creations or historic public domain material. This doesn’t need to be the case: businesses and entertainers commission large amounts of professional photography, and Wikipedians appreciate quality content.

So, here’s how to take advantage of the featured picture program. To get started, brush up on the important licensing information from my last article. Then browse Wikipedia’s featured picture category and read up on Wikipedia’s featured picture criteria. If you think your material is good enough then make sure you have a high resolution image of at least 1000 pixels in height or width.

Next, head to Wikimedia Commons and upload your images. Write up a self-nomination at the candidate page. Volunteer editors review each nomination and reach a consensus decision. As an example, here’s the discussion that promoted Michele Merkin’s portrait. After an image gets accepted you can write up some accompanying text and ask for a turn at picture of the day.

Wikimedia Commons also runs its own parallel featured picture and picture of the day programs. You can try for these also if you like:

• Picture of the day
• Featured pictures
• Featured picture candidates”>

Why are images so welcome while SEO pros walk on eggshells at the text side of Wikipedia? There are more ways to run afoul of site standards with text, especially since the style of professional press releases and advertising copyrighting is entirely inappropriate for an encyclopedia. Many desirable images are proprietary, which means business people are often uniquely positioned to provide encyclopedic content that way. David Gerard estimates that 10% of the image uploads at Wikimedia Commons violate copyright. The site’s regular volunteers undertake the Herculean labor of identifying and deleting that material.

In the long run, more freely licensed material will reduce the inflow of copyvios and that will make a lot of volunteers happier. The chief obstacle, as SEO professional and Wikipedian Jonathan Hochman notes, is persuading a client to loosen some control over copyright. “If you have a performer this could be a great strategy, or if you promote tourism to an area. The much bigger opportunity is to seed the Net with good quality reproducible images.” Businesses often own several nearly identical versions from the same photo shoot but use only one of them. A CC-by-sa licensed upload of one of the alternates may earn featured status on Wikipedia, while the client retains full copyright on the primary version.

Durova is the pen name for Lise Broer, a Wikipedia administrator who confronts some of the site’s most disruptive editors. After graduating Columbia College, Lise attended film school and also served in the US Navy. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

The key is images.

Wikipedia suffers from a shortage of images for use as illustrations and the SEO profession has yet to recognize the opportunity this presents. A modest investment of time learning site standards and licensure options can yield substantial benefits in website traffic, brand recognition, and customer loyalty.

According to Cary Bass of the Wikimedia Foundation, “The Wikimedia Foundation appreciates good quality, freely licensed images, and credit where credit is due is never an issue. Many of our images fall under an attribution license, which often takes the form of a web link back to the releaser’s web page.” So one mutually beneficial SEO strategy is to locate appropriate articles that lack images and upload a targeted set of images for them. As long as these uploads benefit the encyclopedia and the approach doesn’t come on too strong, site volunteers welcome the material.

To see what this means, let’s start by examining a missed opportunity. One of the world’s leading champagne producers is the Taittinger label. They also have some of the most interesting cellars in the business: part twelfth century monastery, part fourth century Roman chalk quarry. I visited the place when I was in France and enjoyed it for the history even though I’m not much for champagne. A good set of copyleft uploads from this firm could suit a variety of winemaking articles and probably appear elsewhere on topics as diverse as French history and Gallo-Roman culture. Unfortunately for both Taittinger and Wikipedia, the lone image on the article about this vintner is an amateur snapshot of the parking lot.

Taittinger is a leading champagne producer that operates in historic structures from Medieval and Roman times, but due to licensing issues Wikipedia’s article depicts only the parking lot.

A glance at Taittinger’s rival Moet et Chandon gives a better impression. The article about this firm, which is the maker of Dom Perignon champagne, contains four respectable images. That establishes an adequate brand presence on the article page, yet a close look shows how this company still misses out on several potential opportunities.

Moet et Chandon, makers of Dom Perignon champagne: the firm could get more traffic and brand recognition with a coordinated strategy.

Of the four Moet et Chandon article images, only one generates an outgoing link to the firm’s web site and that image is under full copyright. Fair use rationales don’t allow for reproduction at related pages where an astute marketer wants to appear and full copyright prevents an image from being housed at Wikimedia Commons. We’ll learn more about Commons later and how it facilitates viral links, but for now it’s enough to note that this company is in six different language editions of Wikipedia but only two of those six languages have an image-based link to the company’s site. Among the other three images on the page, two are under GDFL license and generate no outgoing links to the firm. The third has a CC-by-SA 2.0 license with an outgoing link to the photographer’s web site. Although the brand exposure probably still benefits the company, this image may be a legal gray area since Moet et Chandon owns an underlying trademark.

The bottom line for our discussion is that businesses can generate synergies by selectively re-licensing some images for use at Wikipedia and its sister projects. The first people to understand how to do this effectively are going to gain exposure at high level articles. An innovative SEO approach for either Taittinger or Moet et Chandon, for example, could position an outgoing link by uploading an image for use at Wikipedia’s article about the Champagne wine region or the history of wine. According to Larry Pieniazek, who volunteers for both Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, preferential treatment goes to the first appropriate image that gets suggested for an article. Wikipedia articles aren’t galleries so later candidates need to be substantially better in quality to take the place of an existing image.

Opportunity for high level placements exist across the topic of winemaking. The article American wine has no image at all. That’s right: if you represent an American vintner, your client’s product could become Wikipedia’s lead image of American wine. Other language editions would duplicate that image along with its outgoing link, and other downstream users would continue to spread the brand presence and linkage. A range of other articles lack images:

• Dry wine
• Globalization of wine
• Glossary of wine terms
• Green harvest
• Hybrid grapes
• List of grape varieties
• List of vineyard soil types
• List of wine-producing regions
• Noble grapes
• Table wine
• Varietal
• Wine competitions
• Claret
• Cru bourgeois
• Dolcetto
• Durif
• Mission grape
• Muscat
• Nebbiolo
• Petite Sirah
• Pinotage
• Ruby Cabernet
• Sangiovese
• Semillon
• Viognier
• White zinfandel

Regardless of your client’s specialty, a lot of low hanging fruit probably waits to be picked.

Hosting your images

The ideal location for image uploads isn’t Wikipedia itself but a sister project called Wikimedia Commons. Commons hosting makes it easy for an editor from the French Wikipedia or the Japanese Wikipedia to reuse an image they find at the English language Wikipedia. Of the three Commons regulars I consulted—Bass, Pieniazek and Brianna Laugher—all advised against massive uploads: Wikimedia Commons isn’t a free web host. Yet they all reacted with enthusiasm to the idea of twenty targeted uploads for specific articles that lacked images. A vintner could supply photos of grapevines, harvesting, fermentation, tasting, and finished product.

Sometimes, as Laugher explained, multiple images of the same subject are welcome if they emphasize different aspects of a topic. Laugher recommended the Mayflower search engine to scan Commons content and suggested the Commons help desk as a good place to seek advice.

Pieniazek added suggestions for categorization. “The best way to categorize them is to do it by what seems to come naturally… grapes under grapes, the process stuff under winemaking, and wines under wines. The category system is pretty good even though it could be better. Announcing on the Village Pump and asking for help would be a good thing in this case too.”

Appropriate licensure is important. Wikimedia Commons volunteers agree that CC-by-sa 2.5 or 3.0 is an attractive option for SEO purposes because it can stipulate that downstream users replicate an outgoing link to the client’s site as attribution. Learn the details before taking the plunge: some form of dual licensure might be the best option for a client’s needs and some of the other Creative Commons licenses are not accepted at Wikimedia projects. Credit normally appears on the image page rather than in an article caption.

A checklist for Wikipedia image SEO

1. Do a survey to identify specific articles that lack quality images. Your aim should be to provide unique content where it did not exist before. Create a list of images that would each enhance at least one article.

2. Arrange the appropriate licensing and announce it on your client’s web site.

3. Upload images to Wikimedia Commons. Include a statement about licensing status and an outgoing link as verification. Categorize the images.

4. Over at Wikipedia, notify the appropriate WikiProject with a list that correlates available images to suggested articles and request assistance from volunteers. This indirect approach is diplomatic for conflict of interest situations.

5. Be low key and tasteful. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.

My next column will explain more ways to benefit from image uploads, including tips for landing a spot at some of the best real estate on the Internet: Wikipedia’s home page.

Durova is the pen name for Lise Broer, a Wikipedia administrator who confronts some of the site’s most disruptive editors. After graduating Columbia College, Lise attended film school and also served in the US Navy. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

If you’re not optimizing images on your web site, you’re missing out on capturing some of this increasingly valuable real-estate. Not sure how to optimize images for search engines? Today’s Search Illustrated shows you how to do it simply and quickly:

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

We might reasonably expect that "diversification of signal" could also help with ranking in each of the individual verticals as well. The lines are blurring and beneficial ranking in one area can now leach over to affect another. For these reasons I’m providing some suggestions for using images to achieve better rankings for local businesses and for local search.

A recent Hitwise report indicates that usage of Google Maps increased significantly as a result of more visibility from Universal Search. Another long-running, high-performing vertical at Google is Image Search—until the acquisition of YouTube, Image Search was Google’s second most-visited property. So, leveraging a combination of optimizations for both local search and image search could provide some beneficial synergies.

Most local SEO approaches have focused mainly on yellow pages directory information elements and general search optimizations: using business name and locality in the TITLE/H1/BODY-text; inclusion of business address on all pages of the site; updating of business profile information in the many local directory and info sites; etc. Most of these approaches seem a bit skimpily staid from my viewpoint—I think that local search marketing needs to go further towards the broad enhancement of a business’s basic information. Various image optimizations can do this.

A lot of small business websites I see out in the wild are pretty thin on content. As a consumer, I find that unsatisfying. True, when I’m seeking a local business, I may mainly want to see the basic stuff: where are they located; is there a map; what are their hours of operation; and what’s their phone number. Though, if they were more detailed in many ways, I wouldn’t have to call them, nine times out of ten… a picture is worth a thousand words, so I see both SEO value and benefit to user-experience in beefing up local biz sites’ image usage.

So, what are some of the potential search optimization benefits to various image optimizations?

• Pages which are already formed well and which have plenty of text content might benefit from containing images which also sing to the search engine on the page’s desired keywords. If users are seeking "widgets in Peoria", having pictures of "widgets in Peoria" increases the signal and page relevancy to the search engines.
• Having content available to appear in image search results may increase chances of links or content appearing in regular web search results under the new Universal Search paradigm.
• Increasing the reasons that users might visit your site and linger on its pages could help drive up incremental traffic, giving the site more credibility in the search engine’s eyes.
• Keeping users on your site a little longer once they arrive could help out with beefing up the natural search quality score that Google’s undoubtedly using as a ranking factor. Sites/pages where users bail out rapidly would likely generate a negative ranking signal—it must be bad quality if a user leaves quickly, and search engines can see when a user clicks the back button quickly and returns to their search results.
• Providing more information such as images to prospective clients can increase the chances of conversion. Not only does it help them select one provider out of the crowd, but merely having the pictures available makes the business seem more open and inviting. The implicit transparency automatically makes a business appear more honest and trustworthy. So, having pictures in various online directories may help bring more people to the business and to the website.
• Having a company’s logo icon associated with their listing in various directories may enhance a user’s perception of the quality and trustworthiness of the business.

Ways to use images for local SEO

Here’s a handful of image optimizations which can benefit the overall search marketing and online marketing programs for local business sites:

• Provide a photo of your business facility location/building on your site. If there’s a particularly beautiful or interesting view looking out from your business, you might consider adding that as well. If you’re located near a particular point of interest or other landmark, having the name of it on your site could help in associating your business with that area.
• Provide photos of all your products on your site if you haven’t already. Or, if you’re a service-based business, provide photos of smiling employees providing that service.
• It’s very common to add in a map or link to a map on a local business’s website. I think it’s beneficial for SEO to have the map image stored on the same domain name as the site, though it’s preferable for users to pull in a map dynamically through one of the major providers so that all the zooming and panning controls can be available.
• If your local business has its own blog, add a blog map or FeedMap onto it. This will add a local signal to the blog, and also bring it to the attention of other bloggers in your local area who are also participating in he FeedMaps.
• Always add ALT text into image tags! Describe the images using valuable keywords. Do not over-stuff keywords into ALT text! Make it brief, and naturally-written. Using ALT text is also good for best usability and accessibility as well. For a map image, the ALT text ought to include the business name and location. Ex: "Acme Hotel at 100 Elm St., Springfield, MO 65721"
• Try to also provide similar caption text just below or to the side of images (ideal for the text to be in the same table cell as the image itself, for close contextual association with the image). Visible caption text can be longer than ALT text, but it should still be written in a natural-sounding manner, geared towards consumers.
• Throughout a local site, on all pages the logo image should be linked back to the homepage with relevant ALT text. I suggest using only the business name, business type, and city name. Ex: "Jane’s Clip Shop—Hair Salon in Seattle"
• For businesses such as restaurants, it may be beneficial to add photos of celebrities who have visited the establishment. I see this in all the Asian food restaurants in my neighborhood, since the Dallas Cowboys practice facility is nearby—those shops take great pride in snapping photos of the football players and posting them at the checkout counter. This could translate well for online, too—people perform tons of searches on celebrity names all the time, so this could bring traffic to a business site which could convert. The main thing is that it could drive up inbound links, and get users to linger longer on the site, perhaps bolstering the quality scores.
• For larger companies, or companies involved in more stuff that’s of interest to the general public, add a press kit on the site, including photos of your business and products, and provide loose enough licensing to allow users to take and use those images for their uses as long as they credit you with text below the photo, linking your business name back to your homepage.
• Lots of online marketers have written articles about engaging with the blogosphere to drive inbound links. I won’t go into details, but you could offer free products or services to local bloggers and other reviewers—when you request them to review you, and when you contact them you could provide them with the link to the press kit or to a photo of your business, or to a picture of the specific product or service which they’d be welcome to use in their reviews. Assisting and enabling people to review you can help build inbound links and clickthroughs from the reviews. (You could do this with no requirement that reviewers necessarily provide a positive review or anything—positive or negative, you still win on the SEO front if they hyperlink their posting back to you.) The link should be back to a related info page about the product/service on your site, and having the picture included helps optimize the signal on the blog post as well.
• National chain stores should try to provide a map and a picture of each location on their store locator pages. There’s no reason why they couldn’t get each of their locations to email them a digital picture.
• Submit your site’s images to Google’s Image Labeler program, (sign up through your Google Webmaster Tools account). This will enable your site’s images to get independently tagged with keywords by the Image Labeler game players. Adding more trustworthy keyword signals may help your images rank above others.
• Enhance your business listings in major directories by adding images into their profiles. A number of the main local directories allow this, though some may charge for it. In other cases, any user could upload their pictures of your business—so I suggest that you might want to manage your reputation by being first in line to upload your best pictures before others do. Some of the images from other directories are getting absorbed into Google Maps and displayed there, even though Google’s also now allowing users to upload their own. Here’s a few: InfoUSA/DAplus, Superpages, Yahoo, CitySearch, Yellowpages.com, Google Maps and Yelp.
• Various directories such as Superpages and Yelp have reviews widgets which can be added onto your site—adding these graphic elements to your site could further enhance your conversions, if you have sufficiently positive reviews.
• Add Photos of the business facility and/or location into photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Fotki and 23. Include links pointing back to your website in the image’s caption text, where possible. When adding pictures of your facility and location into Flickr, be sure to drag the image onto the mapped location for the address. Also, upload a picture of each of your products into these photo sharing sites, and then link them each back to the specific product page. Be sure to use all the available features of the image sharing sites in addition to the caption text—enter in a title for the picture, keyword tags, and associate them with any groups, albums, or sets which have a related theme.

• eBay is chock full of images, and this can be leveraged as a sort of advertising medium. I know that some businesses don’t consider eBay to be a worthwhile distribution channel for them, but if you consider them as a promotional vehicle, they can be quite a good value. All eBay auctions should have an image included in them, and you should be able to format your product listing to link back to your site. What’s the local flavor with this? eBay’s advanced search allows consumers to search for products in their geographic area, so there is a bit of a local association, even though I expect that very few people make use of this feature. Still, for providers of products that are particularly heavy and expensive to transport, the local aspect may be very strong in eBay.
• For reasons similar to eBay, upload listings of products to Google Base, including pictures, so that your images will appear in Google Products (formerly known as "Froogle").
• Include a picture in your email campaigns along with a link back to your site. There’s a really great little Mexican food restaurant here in Coppell, Texas, which sometimes emails out weekly special notices, and they will include a photo of the dish that has the special, cheap price. I can tell you—the days they offer those specials they fill up their restaurant! Of course, you should follow other best practices for email marketing—only do opt-in for instance. The restaurant in question has a jar at the front which says something like "Drop your business card in to be notified about our specials."
• Get your suppliers to link back to you! I’ve seen a great many B2B sites out there which include a page listing their clients/partners logos. Invite any/all of your suppliers to do this—squeeze them into committing to it the next time you place an order or re-sign contracts with them. Provide them with your logo image and ask them to link it back to your company website in order to pass PageRank to you.

Once a site has accomplished basic SEO and basic Local SEO steps, increasing the diversity of online signals will be the key to advanced SEO. These image optimization tips for local SEO can help with promoting the business and ranking of the site through diversity of signal. I’ve likely only touched the surface here—feel free to submit additional tips in the comments.

(1) Don’t put the bulk of your visible text in images, use real text (2) Use alt tags to describe the images (3) Do not keyword stuff the alt tags (4) Alt tags are more important when your navigation is all images (5) A webmaster should be watchful of the “image-to-text ratio on your page” (6) Vanessa then pitched Google Sitemaps, with “Taking advantage of Image search”