Google: Mitt Romney is Completely Wrong

For the past week or so searching Google Images for the phrase “completely wrong” has been returning pages upon pages of Mitt Romney’s photographs. Is Romney completely wrong? That’s a good question and I would write all about it (my own beliefs and opinions) if only Extra-Paycheck was a political blog or if I was an American and had the right to vote for Obama… or Romney.

This little Google Images story produced quite a few news stories; (CNN, Fox News) puzzled and amused thousands of people but everyone who’s done the least bit of Search Engine Optimization knows it’s simply a results of Google’s search algorithm and proper SEO.

As Google claims during a news coverage event Mitt Romney said he was “completely wrong” when he made controversial statements that 47 per cent of Americans were “victims” and dependent on government… and as this news story traveled from site to site, including Mitt Romney’s photo it was only natural for Google to add it to image search results.

Google doesn’t want to be more precise on this issue because details might not be easy to explain to people who haven’t a clue about the workings of search algorithms. Submitting a news article with a picture usually isn’t enough to land on the first page of Google Images. There have been thousands of articles written about the unemployment in the USA and many of those used a photo of the current president, Barack Obama. However, searching for “unemployment USA” does not return pictures of Obama… so what’s really going on?

If you pay close attention to these Romney images on Google, most of them have the words “completely wrong” in the name of the images; they have the same words as tags of the image and in many cases also in the description of the image.

For a long time I have been naming, describing and tagging my photos properly for this exact purpose; to help Google find them when someone searches for a related term. Some of my websites get nearly half of their traffic from image results so why not take advantage of it? Besides, it’s an incredibly simple task especially when using WordPress:

• As you can see the actual .jpg file name contains the words “completely wrong”
• The title of the image also contains these words
• Alternate text uses the same phrase
• Description field actually describes what’s on that images and also uses the phrase “completely wrong”

Naming and tagging your photos properly is very important and could result in high search rankings sending you a lot of traffic, which is always good. If you haven’t been doing it until now I am pretty sure this post will get you thinking and hopefully it will make you go back to your older posts and edit your images.

And by the way, if I was an American I would certainly vote for Obama. No hate 😉

Let me know, do you tag and name your images or do you just let them be?

– Alex