Constant Evolution of Image Search

Enlightened as I always am when i scan through the archives of Chris Crum and the wizards over at WebProNews, I stumbled upon an article on the importance of image search optimization to webmasters. We just bought a new template for our site that is based on a lot of image display and I never realized that 5% of overall search done in Google is Image based, in addition, 15% of overall searches are in some way image-related. That blew my mind almost as much as when I found out YouTube is far and away the 2nd largest search engine.

After reading the article in it’s entirety and watching the video of one of the super-geniuses from Google explain semantically how photos are evolving in search, I came to one main conclusion which mirrors all my conclusions in terms of Google…. Take or find good, crisp quality pictures, make them eye-catchy as a portrait that will encapsulate the searcher’s entire attention span. Engagement level amongst image searchers is very high, you’ll get lots of clicks, enticement for faster decision making and ultimately a positive effect on e-commerce impact with relevant crisp photography. Beyond taking and uploading artistic original photographs, pay close attention to the filename, alt text and all descriptive text around the “img” source in your content.

Now time to blow your mind, make sure to add text inside the image. When you are dolling up your photos in photoshop, add text to the images, include your services product specials and relevant key phrases in the image. That text is becoming more important as the engines’ ability to scan text in images and associate it with the picture continues to improve. Google will not only look at the attributes of the photo but also contains a ranking signal of how many clicks the photo has received for certain searches. This reduces spammers getting in and also creates a peer review attribute, so again, make it provocative.

Last but certainly far from least, is the effect on Social Media. Yep you guessed it, as everything you do online these days, get your photos uploaded and spread around FB, MS and through TwitPic on Twitter. Nail pictures to a good amount of your blog posts whenever possible as Google continues to crawl posts and social content pretty much on a daily basis you will feed more of your own unique photos into the Search Image index.

To sum up, always keep in mind all the properties of Google Search. Uploading and referencing relevant artistic photos to your website can increase your exposure in one of the most important properties. With image search analytics available through Google Insight you can keep up with the the effect improved images will have on your website.

With that said, I have just moved to Tulum, Mexico and there is plenty of beautiful scenery to capture around here and use as themes for my posts. I need get outside with my camera and start capturing the beauty around here.

Matt