Images and Search Engine Optimization – A Clandestine Affair

Images bring colour to websites and even invoke feelings in the visitors' minds. Image search has become quite a phenomenon in today's world, which is laden with Internet-savvy people. Search engines specialising in image searches are becoming increasingly popular, and according to statistics, the number of image searches have gone up by more than 90 percent in the last two years. In such a scenario, it is but natural that images play a crucial role in search engine optimization processes.

Although their importance is not often realised, forget about being acknowledged, images searches can make your website popular. Image search engines have their own information retrieval systems that crawl websites and come up with the most relevant results. Displayed in the form of thumbnails, these images open up to links on corresponding websites.

Images can boost the process of search engine optimization of your website. By putting relevant information with your site's images, you can ensure that your pages get listed on top ranks of image search engines. Not only does this improve your visitor inflow, but also increases the chance of holding users' attention on your pages.

'Ditto' was the first site that started the image search service on the Internet. By the year 2001, Google and ‘Picsearch’, changed the face of the search industry by joining the bandwagon and launching full-fledged image search engines for Web users. This revolution shifted the focus from 'text' or content matter, which was ruling the search engine optimization process till then. Visual presence, colours and user gratification led to the success of such websites.

There are lot of misconceptions about the working of image search engines. Contrary to popular belief, the technology behind crawling of images is not dependent on the image itself. In fact, information is detected from the text that's linked to the images. Thus, images are ranked on basis of the ranking of the text information they are linked to. This text information comprises name of the image file, title of the web page containing the image, technical details of that page and the text available on the page itself. An image search engine indexes websites and stores them in its database. At the time of a search, it matches queries with the information that corresponds with an image. The result page presents links in order of relevancy.

Try and incorporate the basic techniques of image search in your SEO campaign. Although it may not produce instant results, it will definitely help your website in the long run.

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