Online search is more or less synonymous with regular web search and little attention is paid to Image Search on the web, even when it constitutes a major portion of daily search activities of web users. It is important for businesses to realize the importance of image search and employ it in the marketing and optimization strategies.

Importance of Image Search

The importance of image search can be guess by the number of digital photographs that are taken everyday and uploaded on the web. And with the evolution of technology and easy access to camera phones, this number is only going to increase further. In fact, the final nail comes with the fact that image search constitutes about 5.7% of all Google searches.

Because of their visual relevance, images do a great job to catch users' attention. Even in Google web search, the results accompanied by images have more chances of getting clicked by the users. This is why user engagement is very high during image search. There are cases when images actually speed up the decision making process of the consumer and translate into quicker sales.

Tips for High Ranking in Image Search

Add Images to Google Local Business Profile
This will make sure that your company location gets listed along with its corresponding image in the search results, be it for the location or be it for the image.

Enable Google Image Labeler in Google Webmaster Tools account
This would make sure all the images are labeled and figure out in the image search.

Add images to Local Business Citation Sources
Whenever you list your business in local directory websites or yellow pages, make sure you include an image as well.

Add images to Blog Posts and News Articles
All the posts that you write for your blog or articles should be accompanied by a relevant image that reinstates the subject of the content. It would be easy to insert keywords in the meta tags that way.

Appropriate Nomenclature
Name your images properly and upload the appropriate product categories for e-commerce pages. This would ensure that the images are under relevant heads and search engine crawlers index them efficiently.

Alt Tags
Don't forget to include alt attributes in tags. The file names should be relevant and in alliance with the surrounding content, overall page context, links, title tags, and so on.

Search Engines Indexing Images

When it comes to indexing images, it not only about tags and attributes. Google uses specialized computer vision to find similar images, object recognition and facial recognition. Apart from the regular tags and attributes, the quality of the image, exposure data, size of the image (thumbnails as opposed to full size versions) are some of the key considerations.

Images in Social Media

Social media mediums like Flickr and TwitPic contain scores of images that can be popularized over the web. Moreover, people also upload and promote images on networking and social book marking websites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious etc.

Kabir Bedi is working as a senior web consultant with LeXolution IT Services, a website Development company that offers a range of web feature services in addition to regular web design and development services and search engine optmization services.