When it comes to image search, Google is considered by many as having the best technology at it's back-end. Google's expertise in the area can be fathomed from the fact that it can search for text within images in your Google Drive storage. But that's something only Google Drive users get. We are talking about the mainstream users here, most of whom prefer Google's image search over other search engines such as Yahoo or Bing. And not without reason. Google performs some of the most accurate image searches of all. And according to latest news, Google is now releasing a new revamped structure for its image search, improving its performance, and making the image's MetaData now visible to searchers!
What's new with Google Image search?
Google has redesigned the interface for image search to bring a better experience to its users. This design overhaul includes a repositioning of the images into an inline panel, which is fast and easily accessible, and is attractive at the same time. You can use your keyboard to flip through images, much like in a digital gallery. And if you want to go back to previous search results, you can simply scroll down and start again.
Another big change (which is significant for webmasters, we'll shortly discuss why) is that, an image's Metadata is displayed right next to it in search results. So now, users don't need to open up a new tab or redirect to another page to another page to see information about the image.
There's also a lot more information about the image available right on the search results, such as the image size, the domain it comes from, and the page it is hosted on. Both the domain and the page links are clickable, so that users have a lot more ease when browsing through images and going over to their source. According to Google, this has improved the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for images overall.
Another big improvement is the removal of the source page from the background of an image. This wasn't really necessary, so Google has removed it, and given a link to the source page instead. This not only makes the images load up faster, it also reduces the load on the host server, hence preventing bandwidth issues.
So, what does this mean for webmasters?
With the introduction of these new changes, one thing's for certain: they will incline users more towards image-searching. Google already says that these new changes have increased the overall CTR for images. And this trend is bound to alleviate. So, what exactly does this mean for webmasters?
First of all, webmasters will now need to concentrate a lot more on optimizing their images. Tagging images has become much more important, because the ALT title and descriptions are now accissible to users right on the search page. So if your images are not properly tagged, users will see those images as incomplete, and will move on to other images. Read this post on tagging images to learn more about driving traffic.
Read the post carefully, and create valuable metadata (tags and description). This will help your images get a high rank in search results, as well as ensure a good click through rate for your images, hence giving you more traffic.
Note: This service is being introduced, and will take a few more days to be implemented fully. So if you don't see any changes, just give it a couple days or so. And stay tuned for more updates. Cheers :)
