March 16th, 2008 by admin | 1 Comment »
They say you can never understand women. I think for us webmasters that translates to you can never understand google. I thought I knew quite a lot about SEO (Search engine Optimization). However I was pleasantly reminded by google that there is just too much that I do not know even after 3 years of trying to understand it.
While Binaryday has managed to get a pagerank of 4, our sister blog adoholik has a pagerank of 2 only. Binaryday has a lot more text rich pages compared to adoholik. Hence I was quite confident that binaryday would receive a lot more traffic from search engines than adoholik. Boy, can I be more wrong? In the last 15 days of march, while binaryday has got little less than 500 visitors from google, adoholik has managed to get more than 2000 visitors.
Where did I go wrong? Well I seem to have underestimated the popularity of google image search. If my experience with the SEO world is anything to go by, then the entire SEO community commits the same mistake. Here is a screenshot of search engine traffic of adoholik to convince you that image search can indeed send you some serious traffic. 
The 2,000 visitors may not look great but when you consider that it is for a website with pagerank 2, in a competitive field like advertisement that number starts looking quite impressive.
How image search became so important?
There is a reason why the seo community by large seems to avoid optimizing for image search. Not so long ago, very few people used it. However some timeback google introduced universal search. Basically universal search brought search results from different verticals like image and video and showed them up on the main Google SERP. I think that was the turning point in the history of image search.
Why you must concentrate on image search engine optimization?
As I have established with the above data image search represents significant opportunity to get search traffic. More importantly you should do it because not many others are doing it. The text search engine optimization is such a widely studied subject that everyone is doing it and if you are targeting a popular term, you have hardly any chance of ranking higher. However image search represents an opportunity to rank higher with comparatively less effort.
How to do search engine optimization for image search?
I am yet to find out myself. Over the next 15 days I shall be doing some serious research myself and using them on binaryday. I intend to keep writing about my experience here. So stay tuned in for more updates.
P.S: If you are a webmaster and you are interested in image search engine optimization then please leave a comment below with your mail id. I shall like to talk to you on the topic.