Optimising Image Search on Google

If you sell products that people desire by the way they look - especially in comparison to others, then you must take image search seriously!

Images are very important if you want to practice conversation domination through universal search. Google treats images in various ways, most are tied into their analysis of the source of the image webpage and it relevancy to the search string.

The Google image search teamhave just released an interesting video on how to optimise images for Google Image search ranking:



These are the salient points from the video!

It explains how images are sorted - search intent of the user is matched to image

Images are clustered and canonicalised (weighted) for duplicate content towards what google thinks is the origin!

At query time they apply image to web page quality scores! They then apply origin relevance score to query

Image ranking uses multi-variate sorting 'signal' to rank!

Query trails from images are measured for 'Bounce rate'!

HQ is given priority (large images - google doesn't like thumbnails unless they are links), above the fold and image text on topic (same as video optimisation) Title Description (including links!) etc

Google Analytics- query and image strings are analysed

New features are regularly being added to Googles blog

Try and get your images on Flickr.com - its owned by Yahoo and is effectively Yahoo's youtube for alternative traffic. Yahoo and Goog have recently started sleeping together - again!