Honest Marketing Secrets

If I type your name, or your product name into the Google image search engine, what will I find? Do you know? Have you checked? The results may be critical to your online success.

If you haven’t thought about image search and tagging, start now. I recently read a great post about image optimization by Judith Lewis over at SEO chicks where she details some excellent points about using images to create relevant results and, by extension, relevant visitors. It gave me some curious ideas about putting image search to use for much more than simple image browsing.

Here’s an SEO image exercise suggested by Lisa Ditlefsen (also from SEO Chicks): go to Google image search and type in your full name. If you’re like most of us, there’s likely nothing there.

Wow, an empty space. So you now have the opportunity to fill that space the way you wish. Make sure people looking for you, or your product, find you. If it’s not empty, you now have the opportunity to make sure what you find is what you want others to find. Probably an important thing. Are you monitoring your image online?

But wait, there’s more . . .

Quality makes all the difference. Have you seen the quality of images on the web and especially in image search results? Holy mackerel it’s awful, for the most part. I feel like I’m using Mosaic and it’s 1993 all over again!

Think about this: If I’m looking for a drawing of a green cow with purple spots and a golden crown and you have the best picture of a green cow with purple spots and a golden crown I’ve ever seen and you only used the term “cow” for your alt tag (if you even used an alt tag, for shame if not! ok ok , I’m for shame too since I am only now starting to use alt tags . . . but I digress . . .) then your image will probably be buried in the mass of cow images in the search results. But if you used the exact terms to describe your image precisely, your green cow with purple spots and a golden crown is probably going to be the only one in the entire list. And there’s probably a fairly good chance I will click on it.

And then the next part of our story unfolds . . .

If your image is an excellent quality image, I will probably be even more interested. We judge images even more stringently and quickly than we judge text when we’re deciding whether or not we have found what we’re looking for. It’s just the way our brains are wired.

So if I quickly eliminate all the crappy images of cows, even if some of them were green cows, once again your green cow will rise even higher in my estimation. In fact, I will probably raise my opinion of you and your web site by association. Heck, I may even dig a bit to check out your site.

Think about this: what if you could get a jump on the rest of the online world because most web site owners don’t know how to tag their images and have no idea why it matters? Imagine what starts happening when you corner the market, as it were, on the kinds of images you deal in simply because you tagged your images and the other folks didn’t. What if your picture quality is so high it blows away all the others in your niche, even if they are also using alt tags? Just some thoughts.

Here are a few resources to get even more ideas along these lines. Get started learning about this now since it’s only going to get more and more relevant as we go.

Here’s a video of Matt Cutts Explaining ALT Tag Use
This a basic intro to the concept . . .

As usual, Dosh Dosh has one of the best resources you can find . . .

19 Ways to Get More Traffic to Your Site Using Google Images

Google’s Image Search FAQ

Have you heard about the Google Image Labeler? Well get cracking!