Enterprise Search Engine Marketing Blog

So, I attended SXSW in Austin, TX last weekend and really had a good time. Attended some good conference sessions, met a lot of people, enjoyed the scene on 6th street, and have honestly never seen so many people walking around staring at their iPhones. Surprised that there were not more accidents involving people tripping or running into walls. In fact, it was amazing to sit in the sessions and look around the room to see hundreds of people staring at their laptops and typing furiously to Tweet about what they were hearing. There were so many messages being sent that AT&T had to beef up their service in Austin.

One of the main reasons I went to Austin was to help promote my articles on Adobe’s new SEO Technology Center –  www.adobe.com/go/seo, which has been getting some very positive feedback. I worked directly with members of the Adobe team, including Ryan Stewart, Justin Everett-Church, and Duane Nickull. We held our Flash, SEO & Bacon TweetUp on Saturday morning, thanks to Julio Fernandez, GSI’s Social Media guru (@SocialJulio). Considering it was at 9:30am on a Saturday after the conference opening, we had a good turnout. It was a good mix of content owners, strategists, Flash developers, producers, bloggers, and the Adobe team. We had a good discussion about the articles and their intent, which was really to provide the community with some good resources about Rich Internet Apps and Search, and to let them know that this is a conversation that will evolve over the next year with their participation.

Seems like this is a hot topic these days as I’ve seen additional posts on various Search-related blogs on Flash & SEO, and noticed that O’Reilly just released a new book on the subject. This is a topic that will be important to follow over the next year as some major technical advances will continue to be made and input from the community will help us get there.

by Brad Cohen, Twitter:supnah

Google Blog (The Official Google Blog) released a new article today on Eye-tracking studies that reveals new information (though not many details) about the inclusion of thumbnail images in search results.  And also has a trippy video of real time eye scan locations superimposed over real search results from a real participant in the study.  Super cool:

The crux of the post is that inserting thumbnail images for Image and Video results does “not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.”  Furthermore, Google claims that the thumbnails make it easier for searchers to skip over results with thumbnails **when those results were not relevant to their search**.

Google Eye-track comparison (right = with thumbnail)

There are two implications here:
1) Although the order of scanning by the searcher is not affected, the attention given to the different results in that order is absolutely redistributed.  It seems from their provided images that the thumbnails distribute more attention further down the results list, not necessarily in an equitable fashion – there are still favorites that get disproportional attention from the searcher – but with a seemingly better spread than in the page without thumbnails.

2) Selection of a thumbnail that does not effectively represent the target page to the searcher can be disastrous because users are faster to decide they **are not** interested in a result when a thumbnail is included.  In short, a picture is worth a thousand words, and if you provide the wrong thumbnail image then you have just given the searcher a 1,000 word essay explaining why not to click on your page.  And all of that in an instant.

Optimizing YouTube videos is nothing new.  Here’s a great guest post by Dan Ackerman on TechCrunch about making videos go viral.  Pay particular attention to tip # 5 about selecting the right midpoint image/thumbnail image for your YouTube video.

Here’s a results page for “intel pentium video” (Intel is one of our clients). It certainly seems like, in this case, the thumbnail draws your eye to the video and through those first two results.  The searcher still scans through the first results, but in a more cursory manner in order to arrive at the thumbnail faster.

As integrated search results and Universal Search are incorporated more and more, thumbnail optimization is going to be a battle not just to gain clicks, but also not to lose them.  At GSI we are helping clients understand the importance of optimizing their page code, their page content, and their social media assets , not only from the consumer intent modeling point of view, but also with regard to how the consumer inteacts with legacy browsers, Google Chrome’s Onmibox and search results from mobile applications.  The current state of search has a long way to go, but it is evolving as we speak.  We encourage your comments on this post.