Optimizing for Image Search

Optimizing for image search can be a very smart strategy since a significant amount of traffic can come from image search, and the number of people competing for that traffic is much lower than the general web search.

There are several different ways that image search optimization can help to improve traffic and conversion for your site.

1: subtle reputation management

Providing a generous number of images of your products, services, and facility assisting consumers during the search gives your company the transparency, saying that you have nothing to hide from the public, which increases the consumer confidence as well as the chance that you will be selected to do business with.

2: shopping via image search result

Consumers are growing searching for products via image search engine, which allows them to find what they desire without digging deep. If your products have a presence in the image search engine, you have an improved chance of being found by people. Otherwise, the chance is zero.

3: increase your chances of showing up more frequently in the universal search

Optimizing image search improves your chance of showing up in the universal search result, an additional position for customers to find you.

4: empower others to promote your business

If you hold the legal copyright to your images, you can allow others to take and reuse the images in return for promoting your business.

Image optimization tips:

Unlike regular web pages, which are often filled with text content, image search is much more difficult for it provides few clues about the content in the image. Though techniques, such as optical character recognition (OCR) to read text content within the images or facial recognition software to determine whether the image is a face, body, or something else, they are still not that effective. For that reason, success in image search optimization depends on using all the signals available to you to increase the search engine’s confidence in the content of an image.

You can do a number of things to further optimize your website. Here are some of the most important ways.

1: give emphasis to the texts immediately preceding or following the image. These texts are what the users and the search engine mostly associate with the picture.

2: make sure the image filename, img, and arc contain your keywords.

3: utilize the alt attribute.

For instance: <img=”Abe Lincoln” src=http://example.com/abe-Lincoln.jpg/>

4: avoid query strings for img src just as we do for web page URL. Removing excessive parameters can reduce the possibility that spider may refuse to crawl your site.

5: use good quality images/good contrast images which are easy to read and more likely to invite a click.

6: do not save images as graphic files with embedded thumbnails, turn this feature off in picture editing software. The search engine may copy your image, reduce them in size, and save them in a compressed format, and deliver a thumbnail of it in the results.

7: do not store the image in the banner, footer, and navigator, the search engine will ignore them as irrelevant elements.

8: have a proper copyright license of the pictures used on your site. Don’t get sued

9: if you are using images that also are shown in other websites, change the file size, aspect ratio of the image or add watermark to tell the search engine that your images are original so that the images won’t be thrown out if the SERPs hit a duplicate filter.

10: make sure your robot.txt files allow the crawlers to access your image files and display them in the search results pages.

11: encourage people to use your images and give credit, which will invite more promotional activities.