Vanessa Fox posted yesterday about using images on your site. The post includes a variety of basic tips for getting the best impact on your search results.
The really good stuff though is a pointer to a cool new feature in Google Webmaster Central. You can read a basic description of the service here. Basically, if you enable enhanced image search in your Google Webmaster Tools account, you will be permitting your images to be labeled using the Google Image Labeler.
This is true social search in action. Once you turn this feature on, anyone can begin to associate labels with your images. So the community at large will begin to label your images, and here’s the kicker, these labels will be used in indexing your images in Google Image Search.
What this means is that your images can begin to show in the image search results for many different types of terms, based on the labels people associate with them. This presents an opportunity for sites with high-quality image content to get considerably more traffic than previously possible when the only available tool was the “alt” text for the image.
