How effective is using Google enhanced image search on your blog?

Enhanced Google Image Search, is an opt-in option/ tool in the Google webmasters central dashboard, available to webmasters for making the images in their sites more visible to the Google search engine. And thereby increasing the chances of incoming organic traffic through Google image search.

How to?

To make the images in your site available to Google images enhanced search feature, tick select the option in Webmasters central.

• Sign in to Webmaster tools
• Click the site for which you want to enable enhanced image search.
• On the Diagnostic tab, click Enhanced Image Search.

What does it mean to opt-in to enhanced image search?

If you choose to enable enhanced image search, Google will use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

1. On opting in Enhanced Image search,
   - Google makes available the images in your site (which have the public access ) to Image Labeler tool.
   - The Google Image labeler tool will assign users to keyword the images on the website and the most favored or matching keywords will be assigned to the images.
   - Any queries matching the keywords (assigned by Google) will throw up pages from our site on Google images search.
   - Google follows a complex algorithm that helps them decide images from which site is be ranked higher to another in the image search results. Much of this has got to do with the normal SERP’s ranking factors combined to the user keyword tags assigned to the images.

Recommendations

- Google Image labeler is an excellent tool available to help increase the visibility of your image on Google image search.

- Although there is ambiguity over how efficient would the user generated keywords/tagging be.

- Also, if the website follows the normal onsite image optimization procedures like ALT tags, Longdesc tags, Text surrounding image, image name, URL etc, they are enough to give the visibility required on the SE’s.

- Google Image labeler also poses the threat of competition corrupting the search results by using improper/meaningless keywords to your images through Google Image Labeler.

Opting in Enhanced Image search is a good option to give that extra visibility to our images on Google. I think it is more suited for small scale websites (or sites selling retail products) that does not follow onsite optimization procedures for Images and make it difficult for crawlers to copy the content from the sites. For blogs that uses less images compared to a normal website, it will bring very less traffic.

Sources
Google Support SeoMOZ Webmasterworld Googlewebmastercentral

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