Google search by image
Posted in Search Engine Optimization on 9th July 2011

So I today I came across a new search facility Google are rolling out called as you may have already guessed. "Search by Image". You can watch a short video on it at the bottom of this article.

So naturally you'll want to have a play with it. So I took some of the sample photos Google provided and dropped them into the search bar. I then received a nice little set of results, saying what Google thought this was. In this example I had used the peace sign provided by Google. It then went on to give me links to peace symbols on Wikipedia and another site, before listing vertical results for peace symbols. So a host of image results were returned. Before finding some other web pages that included matching symbols. Pretty impressive from Google. BUT.................. How good is it really? You can guess what happened next, I took a fairly obscure image and uploaded it. I uploaded a W3C valid XHMTL image and waited for the results. Turns out that Google though that it's best guess was....

Packaging design......

It went on to list 2 websites for about the said guess. It listed images that were visually similar... of which none of them were. But it returns a hosts of matching images from other websites..... Strange really, if can realise that there are matching images on other websites, then why does it not understand what it is a bit better. So I went for another picture, a picture of.......He-man. Sure enough Google was bang on this time. It told me about He-man, provided visually similar images that actually were of He-man and a host of URls that included this image on their pages.

Which brings me to positive ways that as an SEO you can leverage this to boost your clients brand.
Firstly if you or your clients maintain an active blogging or article writing scheme then it pays to obviously right great content, but use the same image of yourself wherever you comment or blog, this will give you one standardized image that represents you and allows people to start associating all the good things you say with the image of yourself. Of course, it takes time, but visually relating a comment to a face only broadens your branding and peoples ability to remember you. So maybe they don't have time to read all 547 comments, but they see the image of you and spend that little bit of time to actually read what your saying, maybe even visit your site, or even link to you. There are tools available that can help you achieve this fairly easily too. Gravatar is one such website that provides you with a way to use 1 avatar for all your blogs, comments, articles. Then people can Google image search your photo and find all your related material.

It also allows you to look for opportunities to guest blog on other's related websites. Find out where people are blogging, what the most influential or active guest bloggers are blogging about and look for a way to have an input into the 1000s of websites that offer these kind of services. They'll love the initiative your taking and the unique user generated content provided by your words. All through searching by an image of an established individual.