What is Image Search?

Wikipedia’s definition for Image Search is a type of search engine specialised on finding pictures, images, animations etc. Like the text search, image search is an information retrieval system designed to help to find information on the Internet and it allows the user to look for images etc. using keywords or search phrases and to receive a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy.
So in brief, Image Search allows you to search from the many images available on the web.

How to do an Image Search?

There are a number of Image Search Engines available including Google Image Search which has shown to be the leading one. Others that are also popular are Altavista Image Search and Yahoo Image Search.

When performing a search the user receives a set of thumbnail images, sorted by relevancy. Each thumbnail is a link back to the original web site where that image is located. Often there will also be an advanced search option to enable the user to adjust the search such as allowing them to search for color or black&white or image sizes.

To give you a quick example of how it works, open the Google Image Search website by clicking on this link.

Enter your search keywords and click Search – in this example we are searching for ‘Umina Beach’. Note how you also see the website where the image is stored.

Click on the image to bring you into the website.

How can I use Image Search to improve my business?

Statistics have shown that approximately 15% of current web searches are for images and in 2005, the number of image searches increased by 91% from 2004 (Nielsen/NetRatings 2006-03-31). Getting a high ranking in Image Search Engines such as Google can increase your traffic considerably and more traffic to your website often means more business.

If your business supplies products or services of which you could include images on your website – that’s the way to go. For example, your website is about a guesthouse in Byron Bay. On your website, make sure to include lots of images of the guesthouse and also of Byron Bay and then optimise these images to improve your ranking.

How do Optimise Images to Improve my Ranking?

If you want to optimise the images on your website to improve your ranking following these guidelines: -

• Include Keywords in your image File names
• Include Keywords in the image Alt Tags
• Consider the size of the image
• The overall theme of the content of the page
• Text surrounding the image