Bing Adds New Shopping Details to Image Search
This is great news and highlights the importance of getting your images ranked high on the Image Search Engines from Google and Bing.
More and more people are using image search as a way to find products and services. Plus, most of your competitors have not figured this out. Optimizing your images for your keywords so that Google (and Bing) can rank them makes it easier to win with competitive industries or products. The fact that Google (and Bing) have dedicated an entire search engine to this should be an indication of its importance!
Below is an image of Greg’s iPhone Stand which usually ranks #1 on images searches. Notice the little shopping cart icon at the bottom of the image. Click it to make it bigger.
Bing Image Search – “Places To Buy”
Bing Image Search – “Places To Buy”
Bing has launched a feature that adds more data to product images, including competitive pricing for the same item sold at different stores, reviews and ratings and store availability.
It’s referred to as “Places to Buy Beta” showing the store availability of the product. In the example above it links to where Greg sells his iPhone Stands on Amazon.
This is a Beta test while Bing is rolling out a new image search feature.
Users can simply find the new “Places to Buy Beta” by clicking on the shopping cart option under the image.
As Covered in Chapter 3 – Overall Highlights of Image Search
Very Important:
• Google has a dedicated search engine just for images.
• Google wants us to help them rank our images.
• Google says: “Great image content is an excellent way to build traffic to your site.”
• Images are easier to get top rank in competitive categories and industries
• Rename all image files with keywords.
• Give each image an ALT tag.
• Images on your webpage must be closely surrounded by text with the same keywords.
• Dedicate a space, equipment, and a program for capturing images.
Important:
• Blended search results boost the importance of image search.
• Google recommends that we optimize all of our images.
• Google prefers good quality, larger sized images.
• Put hyphens between keywords in the file name.
• Give images captions when inserting onto your website if your website design program supports it.
• Optimize PDFs for high ranking.
Helpful:
• Store all images in a folder (directory) called “images” on the server.
• Image searchers behave different than regular searchers.
Why is Google Image Search so Important?
Google Images is a very popular search engine service from Google. Optimizing your images to be found on Google Image Search is completely overlooked and underutilized by most businesses and web designers. Yahoo and Bing have their own Image Search versions as well.
It’s so simple, we can’t believe how many prominent websites do not optimize their images to be found. This is your opportunity folks!
Compounding the problem (or opportunity) is that some web designers don’t believe in the value and importance of Google Image Search. They must not realize that Google and all the other search engines have an entire search engine devoted to ranking images.
We know that all Google cares about is good content. Content that their customers and our customers enjoy seeing. This content is in the form of Text, Images, and Video. Images really are worth 1,000 words and Google loves them so much, they created an entire search engine for them.
