Take advantage of the new image search by Bing and Yahoo

You may not realize it, but there are a number of ways to drive search traffic – simply stuffing your small business website chock full of keywords is only one strategy. For example, one tactic that works particularly well for some industries is image search optimization.

The goal of image search optimization is to get a business' picture to the front of the portal's image page, so when consumers search a keyword and look at the pictures, they will see a company's photograph. Because many organizations tend to focus almost exclusively on traditional search engine optimization, image search is frequently left untouched, which presents important opportunities for small business owners.

As mentioned, image search doesn't work for every company. For example, few people are likely to search for pictures of lawyers and then click through to their websites. However, for a few industries, image search can be a big driver. Tourism companies can hook people by uploading vibrant images of exotic locations, or restaurants may find customers by optimizing pictures of food. It's all a matter of identifying whether your customers would be searching for pictures that pertain to your products and services.

Portals revitalize image search

Image search may become a more prominent activity in the future, with major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing introducing new changes to encourage more people to use the function.

Bing recently rolled out a new tiled image layout inspired by Pinterest. It has also been updated to use the same minimalist user interface that the rest of Bing began using back in May. Images found through the search engine are also bigger, and the portal now has a "magnifying glass" tool as well, which pops up above each image with new information.

"In the last few weeks, we've launched a beautiful new look for Bing search," the Bing team wrote on the company's blog. "Starting today, we're rolling out the same fresh look for Image search, which makes up 7 percent of all Bing searches. Say goodbye to tiny thumbnails and hello to an endless stream of big, beautiful pictures from across the web."

Yahoo similarly launched a redesigned image search function. Much like Bing, Yahoo's new image search is laid out neatly in tiles and is optimized for whatever platform searchers are using, from desktop monitors to tablet devices.

Newly uploaded images have a special overlay on top of them as well, helping the search engine to show off trending pictures. The overlay will also note whether specific pictures are high quality, giving website owners further incentive to upload vibrant images.

Leveraging image search

With Bing and Yahoo taking great strides to make image search more relevant and useful to consumers, entrepreneurs have more incentive to integrate image search optimization into their marketing efforts.

One of the best ways of doing this is by using keywords in the image's file name, Search Engine Journal suggests.

"Use descriptive file names for your images and make sure your keywords are included," the news source advises. "For multi-word file names use hyphen as the separator and not underscores. If you have an image of a Red Widget on your ecommerce site it is always better to name it as Red-Widget-For Sale.jpg, rather than using some nonsense name like DSC12345.jpg or even just Widget.jpg."

Do you use image search to drive traffic to your small business website? What pictures convert the most searches for you?

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