A site with no text

[Misscj]

Hi guys,

I was thinking about how you would optimise a site that had no text, and wasn't built in flash, but had pictures on it. Imagine it sold goldfish for example.

Apart from optimising the images, what would you do to ensure it ranked number 1 in Google for its target term?

There's been a lot of talk about search engines being designed to "think like humans". Do we need them to? And are the SEO methods you'd use "human-like" in your opinion?

Thanks!

[JohnW]

Maybe or not #1, but pages like this can rank well in most circumstances. Properly use the keywords in page title and description tag, image file name, image alt, image title, and make sure to get some quality inbound links that use the keyword in the anchor. Don't overdo it.

[beu]

Originally Posted by Misscj

There's been a lot of talk about search engines being designed to "think like humans".

Even if they could "think like humans, I'm not sure they're advanced enough to really "see" images like humans. I'd stick with JohnW's advice paying attention to ALT tags for sure...

[Misscj]

Thank you,

I'm quite sure search engines don't think like humans, I know that for a fact and I don't believe they can see images either .

I find it interesting however to think about how we manage data and relate it to a search engine for example. There's a lot of research in A.I at the moment on classification and interaction with data.

I wonder if there is anything a human would use to identify the site apart from looking at the images and the meta data and such things. And so, could there be other variables for the search engine?

[Lauren]

Google is also looking into facial and scene recognition as well. Here is a short article about it and video of an interview with RJ Pittman
http://searchengineland.com/080715-084529.php

In regards to "And so, could there be other variables for the search engine?"
Just last month at SES San Jose Matt Cutts said there were more than 200 variables.
Having a page with just an image does limit what on page changes can be done to optimize for that keyword. Your best best may be to try to get the image ranked so it can show up in universal search

[Misscj]

Thanks for the resource Lauren.

[bikeman]

I think search engines behave more like screen readers for the partially sighted or a text only browser.
Try something like lynx viewer and optimise what that sees.

[beu]

Originally Posted by Lauren

Google is also looking into facial and scene recognition as well.

Good info Lauren, it's actually already being used:
http://picasa.google.com/intl/en_us/...-nametags.html