One aspect of search that doesn’t get discussed often enough is image search. It’s such a huge part of search and the daily habits of web surfers all over the world, it’s amazing how little attention is actually paid to it when it comes to marketing and optimization.

Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman dropped some facts at SES. 300 million digital photos are taken every day. 100 billion images are taken per year. There were half a trillion images in circulation by 2009. That’s the past up to the present. Do you think it’s going to slow down? Pittman says there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.

On Google there are hundreds of millions of image searches every day. Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting says that image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google searches. “We estimate that up to 15% of all search is image related,” he says.

Why Image Search is So Important

If the above information wasn’t enough to convince you of the importance of image search, consider this. When images appear in blended search results (such as Google’s universal search), the images affect what is clicked on the results page. Enge says an eye tracking study proved this, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. The image is obviously going to catch your eye, regardless if it’s the top result or the 5th.

Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager for Bing says that engagement is quite high when it comes to image search. Consumers looking for images also end up visiting a lot of web pages. In many cases, images can simply speed up the decision process on the consumer’s part. You can see why this would be effective in eCommerce. “When users are expecting images in a search session it actually increases the speed of a searchers task,” says Schwartz. “Images simply speed decision making.” He would know. Bing  is the “decision engine.”

Here are some tips from Search Engine Journal’s Dev Basu, who recommended the following for image SEO:

- Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

Here is some additional info from Google:

Schwartz says for Bing, you should name the images properly and upload product categories for eCommerce images.

Enge suggested some even more basic tried and true SEO tactics that should still be applied. Include alt attributes in <img source> tags. Name files appropriately, and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. This stuff is all good, but you should know that the way search engines are handling images is evolving.

How the Search Engines Handle Images

Pittman says it’s no longer just about looking at tags and stuff, at least at Google. “We now use computer vision and search to find similar images, object recognition, and facial recognition,” he says. “We look at everything such as exposure data to help determine the quality of an image. If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high. If you make only a thumbnail of an image it won’t rank as well as a larger image of the same subject.” (Emphasis added.)

Back in June, Google released a fascinating research paper that looked at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. The goal is to get computers to recognize landmarks (for example, the Eiffel Tower, the Lincoln Memorial, or the example Google shares – the Acropolis). This is no easy task when the engine has to rely on images of the landmarks, which are incredibly varied by angle, lighting, photo quality, etc.

This was just a research paper, and not a Google product, but one can only imagine where this research will lead with regards to how Google handles image searches.

The image filters that search engines use are worth paying attention to. If you’re trying to sell products especially, it could help to consider where you want your images to rank. Google lets users search images by size, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and color (full color, black and white, specific color).

Bing lets users browse results by size, layout, color, style, and people. That is in addition to the query-specific options you get.

As far as regular web searches, Bing and Google both present a number of options for users to refine their searches. Bing of course has the explore window, which for many queries, provides multiple categories. Google has its search options. Images are included in that.

Just like with any content, there is always concern that stolen material will rank higher than the original source. Pitman was asked about this at SES with regards to images. He said that image search ranking is largely dependant on how often that image is clicked on for the search query being done. He says Google is trying to combat “hotlink spam.”

Social Media and Images

Social media accounts for a huge amount of the pictures on the web. Not only do you have sites like Flickr and Picasa, but there are so many people uploading so many photos to Facebook and MySpace, not to mention apps like TwitPic for Twitter.

Believe it or not, real-time search plays a vital role in image search, just as in regular search. People want up-to-the-minute information, and that often comes in the form of images. Some real-time search engines are expanding how they handle media like images and video.

Perhaps the more significant part of this equation is the reputation management factor. Real-time search helps in this regard, when you’re trying to protect your reputation, but good old-fashioned Google searches are vital too.

“Think about the pictures that your employees are putting up on social sites,” says Liana Evans, Director of Social Media at Serengeti Communications. “Images can hurt your business reputation.”

Social media has a direct relationship with search rankings too.

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to images on the web. A couple other things that we didn’t really touch on are SafeSearch filters and Creative Commons licensing. These are things you should explore further if you think they will affect you. There is plenty of info out there about both.

One other thing I’d like to mention is that Google’s Insights for Search analytical tool now includes image search data. This could be a very useful tool for anyone looking to improve their performance in image search.

SEO Affiliate Niche Empire the REAL TRUTH !

If you’re ready to take your affiliate business to the next level and start building your own VRE (Virtual Real Estate) empire then this information could take you from earning $1,000 or less per month to making six figures per year in passive income. The “secret” is to work smarter by building, expanding, and duplicating the process over and over again until you’re at the level of income you want.

I’m sure you’ve heard of term “rinse and repeat“. Well, this is the concept in all its glory! It will teach you how to make money online.

First, let’s assume you’re targeting a high demand niche that has a constant flow of hungry prospects eager to buy what you’re offering. This is an essential part of the master plan.You want to position your sites in a prime location where they can benefit from a niche that has a massive amount of consumer spending. This will enable you to increase the scalability and profitability of your business in the long run.

Smaller “less well known” niches that don’t have some sort of mass-appeal won’t be as effective with this strategy but can still prove to be viable. Only your own test results will tell.Think of building a VRE niche empire much like you would a real-estate empire. The more properties you own and control the more money you can make.The same holds true on the internet if you know how to build quality sites with a solid foundation of traffic and incoming links.

To achieve this you need at least a shared hosting account that offers multiple dedicated IP addresses so you don’t leave any footprints that the search engines can follow. Multiple sites in the same niche on the same shared IP address can trigger a red flag to the search engines.

You don’t want to risk getting your sites slapped!

You’re also going to need a system for building sites that can be quickly and easily duplicated without sacrificing quality. For this purpose WordPress is really the best way to go.WordPress has become the easiest to use and most SEO friendly platform for creating affiliate sites hands down. It’s definitely not just for bloggers anymore!

Today’s savvy marketers are using WordPress as their preferred platform for creating affiliate sites.

Why WordPress?

Because not only is it quick to install but themes are easy to modify and customize to your needs. You can turn WordPress into just about any kind of site you want without having it look like a typical blog.Here are two of my favorite types of affiliate sites that can easily be created using WordPress.

Automated Niche Content Portal Sites

These sites are the foundation for your network of niche affiliate sites. They’re like an all-inone niche portal that provides the much needed “link juice” and traffic to new sites until they have enough PR (Page Rank) and incoming links to stand on their own rankings.For building a niche content portal you’re going to need a WordPress theme that looks like a portal site. I’ve found that the magazine style themes like the popular Revolution2 theme work best for these sites.

What’s makes these sites automated is by using RSS feeds to fetch content from a variety of sources and posts it to your site. The content feeds can range from news, articles, videos, podcasts, and any other type of syndicated content available in your niche.Just like any other portal site you can setup categories for each type of media content you use. You can even add links to these categories on your site’s top navigation bar. These content portals are automatically updated with fresh new content that the search engines love. Once you set one of these sites up you can leave it alone and it will continue to generate a steady flow of free traffic and incoming links on auto-pilot. To monetize your niche content portal you can insert affiliate banner ads into the sidebar that are targeted to products in your niche.

But to make money online directly from these sites isn’t the ultimate goal. The beauty of it is being able to leverage the PR (Page Rank) for your “money sites” to help boost their rankings.To find the RSS content feeds to use for your niche portal site all you need to do is download a free RSS reader and search for your niche keywords. Another way to find them is to simply search Google for “keyword +RSS feed” and you should be able to find plenty of them.

Speed Up Google News Crawling

Getting you site’s content crawled by Google News is not the easiest thing in the world. Luckily, Google has a number of guidelines that can help you get your content in. Furthermore, today, on the Google News Blog, Abe Epton of the News Online Operations Team posted 8 tips to help Google News better crawl your site. These are:

1. Keep the article body clean
2. Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
3. Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
4. Check your encoding
5. Make your article publication dates explicit
6. Keep original content separate from press releases
7. Format your images properly
8. Article titles in Google News

Most of these are pretty self-explanatory. He does elaborate on each of them in the post, but I’ll clear a few up here. When he talks about cleaning up the body, he’s referring to formatting as well as HTML.

“If your article body is broken up by tags, ads, sidebars or other non-article content, we may not be able to detect the actual article body, and reject your article as a result,” explains Epton. “In addition, if you place the beginning of your article’s body near the title in the HTML, we’ll be more likely to extract the correct title and snippet.”

With regards to the stock tickers, they simply help Google better determine the subjects of articles. On encoding, Epton notes, “We occasionally see articles that declare themselves to be encoded in one format (say, UTF-8) and are actually encoded in another (say, ISO 8859-1).”

As for the “article titles in Google News” tip, I’m admittedly a little hazy myself. At the time of this writing, Epton’s explanation cuts off.

Beyond these tips though, there are plenty more to be obtained fairly easily by perusing the Google News help center. For example, a look through the technical requirements section for publishers will give you precise details about URLs, domains, drop-down menus, dynamic content, javascript, flash, forums, frames, languages, etc. The resources are there. Use them.