Are You Ready for Image Search Optimization?

September 23rd, 2007

Are You Ready for the Newest SEO Game in Town?
Image Search Optimization
by Laura Thieme

The latest form of search engine optimization (SEO) is image search optimization.  To see if your site is in the game, go to Google, click on Images (text link at the top of the page, in the left hand corner).  Click on Advanced Image Search and type in your site’s address in the Domain field.  It shows you the images that your site has in its index.

We only have 16 images in Google’s index.  A site like Ebay is over 30,000 images.  SpaFinder.com has over 1700 images indexed.  Levenger.com has less than 50.  What causes Google to climb these images?

One of the things you need to do if you’re trying to improve the rate at which Google climbs your images is Enable Enhanced Image Search in Google Webmaster Tools.  If you’re not the webmaster, I suggest you talk to the Webmaster and ask for permission to review their settings and/or to go ahead and ensure this feature is enabled.  I just enabled Bizresearch’s site - I’ll let you know if it increases image crawling rates or if it’s like Google Sitemaps.  I’m not one bit convinced Google Sitemaps helps my site at all.  I’ve been adding more images to my blog than ever before.  Yet, Google is taking nearly three weeks to climb our new blog images.  It’s time-consuming to also add them to Flickr and Google Images docs, and that doesn’t always list your site, it lists Flickr.com as the image holder.  So, other than inbound links which are obviously valuable, I’m still working on the rules to this new SEO game of image search. 

For example, I’ve picked up a few new pictures at one of my favorite day spas here in town.  I’ve noticed that this is one search in Google that consistently shows images showing up in the top ten search results.  So, here is my effort towards Universal Search.

Rhinestone Spa Pedicure at Mario Tricoci Day Spa in Easton Town Center

Do you think these shoes make my toes look big?  Just kidding.  Of course, image search optimization experts talk about the value of contextual content surrounding images.  If I hope to show up for "pedicure" in Google’s image search, I also need to write about pedicures - note picture above.  This particular post is not about pedicures.  So, perhaps I have to write a post all about pedicures.  My post about Mackinac Island and Search N Spa -  none of those pictures have been picked up yet.  Thus my Google image search for Mackinac Island or Mackinac Island Lighthouse - it’s no surprise that I don’t show up as those pictures haven’t been picked up by Google Images yet.  I posted those pics and blog entries on September 1st.  Now that I’ve enabled image search with Google - let’s see if I speed up the process.

I’m practicing on image SEO for both our site and clients simultaneously and yes, we’re learning just like everyone else is.  Only hope is that we’ll be ahead of our client competitors.

Clients: Make sure your Google Webmaster Tools are enabled with enhanced image search.  And, the rest of it, we’ll advise as we learn best practices.  For those of you who are ecommerce sites, you have huge potential here if Universal Search shows up for your desired keyword phrases.  We typically see this in one keyword search terms, which are rather broad searches.

Posted in Uncategorized.

 

Related Posts

Comments are closed.