Image representing Google News as depicted in ...
Image via CrunchBase

This is from a discussion on LinkedIn…from Phil Davies of BigNews.biz I’m impressed with his knowledge and will use this in a future webinar along with some stats I got from PRWeb. I was wondering how Google chooses images to go with news stories in Google News.

I could tell that it wasn’t usually the image I submitted with the story. I also wondered if adding an image had much of an affect on the results.

Now I have some answers…this is quoted from Phil. Like most things Google, it’s a popularity contest…

Google news and Bing news both include photos from press releases in their search results. Including a photo with your online press release has the potential to more than double your traffic. In most cases, a good, well optimized photo will drive much more traffic than your headline. Here is a quick tutorial to help you optimize your photos to get maximum exposure online.

  1. Select a photo to accompany your press release that is interesting. Google news seems to actually test photos to determine which one is clicked on the most by readers. The most “popular” photo then becomes the default image for that story.
  2. When publishing your press release online, be sure to use a press release distribution service like http://www.BigNews.biz that is optimized for photo distribution. Here is a list of some other free PR distribution sites you might like to try: http://www.shrinkpictures.com/ . In the resize images box…

a) select the file on your computer that you want to upload to BigNews with your press release.
b) Select New Maximum Image dimension by clicking “Custom” and enter 300
c) Do not check the special effect box
d) Set the resized image quality to “good”
e) Click the resize button

The page will reload, then select “Download this picture now” and save the file to your computer. BE SURE TO RENAME THE FILE USING AT LEAST TWO KEYWORDS THAT PERTAIN TO THE PRESS RELEASE! Do not use more than two keywords. Use this photo when you upload your release to Bignews.biz or any of the other sites on the list.

Another important thing to keep in mind when selecting a photo is that Google news is going to convert your photograph to an 80×80 pixel thumbnail on their system. So when selecting a photo remember to pick one that will look good at that size.

Believe it or not, many people use Google images to search for things online. One of my press release distribution sites actually gets about 40% of it’s search referrals from Google Images. That’s a huge number and represents more referrals than this particular site gets from either Yahoo! or Bing search.

So if the topic of the release has visual impact, that’s even more of reason to include a photo when distributing it.

If you are uploading a press release and a photo to the Web and it is for a unique topic that does not appear to have any other competition in the Google news search results that day, there is a very good chance that your photo is going to show up as one of those left column photos you see in Google news search results.

The problem is the above scenario rarely happens. Google news currently indexes press releases and news stories from over 25,000 sources. Most of the time your release is going to be competing against news and other releases.

So, if the NYTimes, Chicago Tribune, LA Times and AP are all covering the same story as your press release on that day, Google news is going to have a choice of images to run in that one left column position that will represent ALL of those stories. The result is a mini photo contest hosted by Google news where the photos from each story are tested by Googles algorithm to see which one is more popular with their readers than the others.

If your photo wins this “contest” it’s going to end up as the featured image for that group of stories and probably drive a ton of traffic to your release. So optimize your photos whenever possible.

Note from Janet: I bet this applies to blog posts as well – they’ll get more traffic if you include an image. I like Zemanta because I can take a bunch of pictures and then easily insert them into blog posts.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Press Releases are Referral Engines! Learn How to get business leads and traffic with the Killer Online Press Releases book & DVD combo

  • Share/Bookmark

3 Responses to “Dramatically Increase Traffic by Adding a Photo to Your Press Release”

  1. bitty_boop (Brittany James) Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 6:07 pm

    @amandasm4 Did you see this about putting pics in press releases? http://tinyurl.com/yabsudx

    Like or Dislike: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

  2. AmandaSm4 (Amanda Mueller) Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 6:57 pm

    Thanks for this link! RT: @bitty_boop: @amandasm4 Did you see this about putting pics in press releases? http://tinyurl.com/yabsudx

    Like or Dislike: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

  3. Nisha Pawar Says:
    March 11th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    Interesting stuff…i found a webcast which discusses similar stuff. You should take a look. http://prperspectives.tumblr.com/post/398433612/exploring-social-media-in-pr

    Like or Dislike: Thumb up 0 Thumb down 0

Leave a Reply