A step above the organic results : How to get in the OneBox?

Image search results in web search pages

[seochristine]

Doing a random search on a variety of keywords, I observed that in a typical results page there are a few more results just above the organic search results. Google lists a variety of other search results on top of the page for a typical query. As for eg. while searching for a typical animal (viz. sea horse, blue whale...) or fruit(jackfruit...) you are most likely to get image search results on a normal web search query. When you search for a city or country, the chances are that you will either get a news search result or maps result. While searching wierdly with just alphabets we see results from google finance, yahoo finance etc.

Now what is quite amazing is that for a few search terms we even get a company logo or the image related to a company in that domain or industry. On what basis does G do this? Why doesn't this happen for all queries? Is ther any way to get your site listed there?

[edited by: tedster at 6:50 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2006]

[tedster]

This is the page area that Google calls the "OneBox" -- see [google.com...] for more.

It can hold all kinds of information to help the user refine the search. The data can come from local search, book search, Google Base, on and on.

[seochristine]

Are there any optimization techniques to get your site out there in the onebox results?

[tedster]

This area is not one of my strengths (yet!) All I know to do is make sure that the data is available on each of the channels -- use the feed or API that is applicable.

Anyone have any tips for the OneBox? I know we have some Image Search optimizers around here - can you get your images into the OneBox?

[trinorthlighting]

Here is what we had success with:

Properly name your photos when you save them on your site:

Example:

123456.jpg

Should be

Red_Widget.jpg

One word description works good also

widget.jpg

The other thing is that in the alt tag for the photo, put a few words in there

Red Widgets on top of the shelf

Those are the only ways google can really classify your photos.

Also, in your webmaster tools, opt into the image description. That way users will classify pictures.

[seochristine]

Does all this guarantee a position in the onebox?
Have been doing all this for long. Are the onebox results affected by image search optimization, or other google features?

[g1smd]

A quick reminder to avoid underscores and spaces in filenames, and to use dots or hyphens as word separators.

[trinorthlighting]

No, it does not guarantee it. I think image search will be evolving for quite some time.

But, those are good practices.

[photopassjapan]

I won't pose as if i knew what i'm talking about anymore, but <:) ...
having a space in the filename seems to be recognized by ImageSearch better than web search... i think.

[g1smd]

Spaces get turned into %20 which pretty much%20makes%20any%20URLs%20with%20spaces%20unreadable.

[photopassjapan]

Yeah i know, but when i checked whether ImageSearch can reverse urlencoded space characters, i found that it actually lists the images with the filenames using spaces, and that the words are even searchable individually. I tried, that's how i noticed... but i don't think the same works with web search.