Seo

One of the overlooked traffic sources is from Google image search. If you have a website and are not using images or optimizing them, then you should start now because they can bring your websites a substantial amount of traffic. Here's a few points to think about regarding this source of traffic.

* Images often will appear in the universal search. Universal search is the main Google search and now you will notice that images are appearing more and more there. This is another excellent reason to use images as much as possible. If you do happen to get an image to appear among text only results the image will stand out and is more likely to get clicked.

* Images can appear in maps and in all of Google online properties such as at panoramio.com.

* Images have a unique search behavior. This is because when you do an image search you are looking for a certain image usually and not information. Your eyes will instantly absorb all the images on the page and being ranked at the top doesn't have as much importance as in the web search because you may instantly focus on an image in a lower part of the page if it catches your eye.

* Image search is also very subjective by nature. If you do a search of "rain forest" the image of what a rain forest should look like might be different than what others think. So, it is because of this that often searchers go much deeper in the image results than they normally would with the universal search. You can consume the results very quickly so this also adds to searchers tending to go deeper into the results.

* Novel search uses such as a way to get ideas, inspiration, shopping, research, health queries or just to kill time. Another interesting use of image search is as a visual dictionary.

Image search works in a few steps. Basically the website pages get crawled by spiders looking for images. Once they find them they classify them into different types of images which then can be useful in the filters used heavily in image search. After they are classified they are indexed.

Webmasters can use image search the best by focusing on the user and trying to understand what they are looking for. It's a good idea to set up your landing page so once the visitor does click on your image they will have a lot of good content to keep their attention. Plus, take high quality pictures, put the good content above the fold and also use descriptive text.