Two scientists at Google last week presented a research paper at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, detailing their vision for the future of image search algorithms.
Until now, the accepted method of optimising websites for ranking in image searches was through optimising the text around the image. Search engines have also been working on improving their own textual data surrounding a particular image - take Google’s Image Labeler for example, where users are asked to coime up with words to describe an image that must match what another ‘player’ has typed. An innovative idea but still very labour intensive.
However Googlers Yushi Jing and Shumeet Baluja’s claim their experiments into using state of the art image recognition in conjunction with existing ranking algorithms is turning up some promising results. Their plan is to study the actual content of an image and then rank them on their popularity and similarities with other images.
If Google push forward with this research further, it might not be long before we have a truly artificially intelligent mechanism for ranking image search results, with the natural progression from there being the ranking of video content.
Rik
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
Many webmasters have found that their website does not rank in www.google.co.uk. For UK sites this is a massive problem as they will be losing most of their home traffic. It has been estimated that nearly 40% of users click the "pages from the UK" button to narrow down their search on Google.
There are of course measures you can take to help you get UK listings including:
1. Change to a .co.uk domain name
Probably the most obvious change is to change to a .co.uk domain name. Google will be able to identify your country of origin by your TLD (top level domain). This however is not the best option if you already have a powerful .com domain name that is achieving good listings.
2. Obtain UK Hosting
If your site is already quite well established on the internet you will probably want to keep the .com domain name. Your next option to try and obtain listings in www.google.co.uk is to obtain UK hosting. Google also uses your host’s location to identify your country of origin. Be careful here though as you might see some keywords listing in www.google.com drop slightly.
3. Submit your site to Google local UK
It is actually possible to submit your site to Google using Google local. Here you submit your site and its address (which will be UK based) to Google local. After submission your site will be added to Google maps. This submission will inform Google that you are a UK based company, which may help your site get UK listings.
4. Obtain links from UK sites
Google also looks at the origin of your inbound links to determine your locality. If you source more UK links this will help Google determine that you are a UK based company. You could also enforce this by submitting your site to relevant UK based directories.
5. Put your address on the site
This is the most obvious change. Simply mention your UK address somewhere on your website. Once Google indexes your site it will pick up your UK address, which may well help you to obtain UK listings.
My advice for new sites to obtain UK listings is to follow all of the above. Sites which are already established on the internet should only follow points 2-5
Paul
SEO Project Manager
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
