Supplement Your Ecommerce Site Traffic via the Image Search Engines
According to SearchEngineWatch.com, over 360 million image searches occur each
month. And recent statistics from Hitwise® show the annual growth for the image
search is over 90%, making it one of the fastest growing search verticals. This
article explores how web merchants can augment their website traffic by getting
listed in the image search engines.
The Big Five
All of the leading search engines now have a specific vertical for images. But when it
comes to image searches online, nobody comes close to Google™. According to the
Hitwise study, Google Image Search accounts for as much as 72% of all image searches
conducted on the Net today! Apart from Google, Yahoo®, Ask®, MSN® and AOL® make up the
remaining top-five positions for the most popular search engines for images.
Web merchants should concentrate on optimizing product photos and other site images
for these popular engines, especially Google.
Social Image Sharing
In addition to this new breed of image search engines, image searches are also available
via social network photo sharing sites such as Flickr™ and PhotoSite®, as well as more
traditional social networks like MySpace®. These sites—whose audiences range from
professional photographers to bloggers and photo enthusiasts—also get a large number of
hits, though not when compared to the top five image search engines. Merchants may want
to consider checking with these social image sharing sites to determine if they provide
additional options for getting their images listed.
Image Search Engine Optimization Tips
Since the major image engines automatically index images when they spider the web,
merchants can grab their share of the traffic generated from the image search engines
simply by ensuring that images on their site are properly optimized. Follow these
guidelines:
Ensure that images are unique. Most of the search engines look for original images. You can
make your images “different” by retouching them with image editing software like Adobe®
Photoshop®.
Offer quality images on your site. The right kind of images (both full-size and thumbnail
images) must have a certain standard of clarity and quality. Grainy, washed out, blurry,
and/or oversized images are unacceptable. Text in images should be crisp and highly
readable. By providing quality images, you improve your overall site and dramatically
increase the changes of having them appear in an image search.
Use relevant file names and naming conventions. The names should describe your
image. Many of the engines use the files names to display the title of the image. Include
product names, where applicable. ‘30 GB Apple iPod.JPG’ is a far better choice
than ‘111_5033.JPG’.
Optimize the web page text that contains the image. This includes page titles,
headings, image captions, and text. Since the image labels displayed in engines vary,
using good web page content will increase the likelihood of your image getting properly
labeled by the search engine and up the chances of someone clicking through to your site.
Google, for example, builds the label that appears on its image search results from the
content on the web page.
Ensure that access to the image files on your site is not being blocked by your web
server’s configuration. Not long ago, it was a common practice for webmasters to block an
images directory from crawled by the search engine spiders. If you suspect this is
happening, check the robots.txt file to make sure there are no exclusions set up for
your image directories.
Refresh your images regularly. Since the major engines use a “freshness dating” element
by which current images can carry a higher degree of relevance, you can try re-uploading
the images to see if that helps with getting them re-indexed.
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Clicks
By following the guidelines above, you will significantly increase the chances of having
your images featured in the top search engines and more viewers will click on them. If you
provide attractive images that will get the attention of image seekers and follow the simple
guidelines above, then you will likely see a boost in website traffic as a result of image
searches.
