eNicholas

Visual Search Technology – How to optimize for Google Goggles

SEO for Google goggles

I’ve been reading about “Google Goggles” lately and as usual, I’m trying to get my head around the bigger picture in hope of predicting future trends. I’m also doing some testing on how to SEO for Google Goggles, which we’ll get into after a quick update on the service…

For those that haven’t heard about Google Goggles (that’s no typo either guys), it is one of the cool new services being developed over at the Google Labs.

Goggles basically allow you to take a picture from your phone, then submit that photo as a search query to google. After a short amount of time, search results will be returned to your phone based upon the photo you submitted.

Confused about Google Goggles already? Let me give you a simple example….

Let’s say you were at the park one day and saw a dog that you liked the look of, but didn’t know what breed it was and never had the chance to enquire with the owner. Well to solve the puzzle, you could either:

• sit down with a book of dog breeds and flick through every single page until you found it
• jump on google and type the physical attributes of the dog into the search box and see what came back
• you could just snap a photo of the dog using your phone, then have google goggles send you search results based upon that photo (wiki info, youtube vids, recommended dog food, fan sites of the breed, etc)

I think this new way of searching for answers will take a slight paradigm shift, because most of us are so used to simply typing a question or keywords into google. But Google Goggles will (at times) make it faster and easier for you to ask questions because you wont need to describe the problem, object or topic.

Just look at the example I gave above to see the time saving implications! Using the old school method, you would first have to find a book of dog breeds which could take hours if you were to leave the house and visit the library or book store.

If you were to do a manual text search in google, this would generally take a few minutes once you returned home and fired up the PC and typed something like “brown dog with long hair that is 30 inches tall and looks like a cocker spaniel cross highland terrier” into googles homepage. But now with Google Goggles, you don’t need to come up with descriptive keywords or a question, because you snap the photo and then send it from your phone. The Goggles service (a huge network of computers, not actual people sitting down looking at the photos in case you’re wondering) then interprets the photo and queries it’s own databases to find related websites.

So in terms of ‘SEO for Google Goggles’ some of you might be wondering how do we optimize for this new service so that our websites are deemed relevant to a goggles search? Well this will be an evolving process, because I’m sure the Goggles algorithm will be constantly updated and improved. But by using basic SEO fundamentals and a little bit of guess work, then I think it is safe to say these methods will work if you want to SEO optimize for Google Goggles:

• #1 SEO tip for Google Goggles:
  Start implimenting optimized images on your website that feature either the solution you’re providing or the problem it is fixing. If you sell wine for example, you would probably have an image of each type of wine on your site already… but do you have close up shots of the label, the stamp on the cork or  the bottle seal that goes over the cork?
• #2 SEO Tip for Google Googles:
  Create geographical cues on your site in places like the about us page. If you were a coffee shop next to Trafalgar Square, then place a photo of the location on your site that states you are just 100 feet away. Then if someone uses Google Goggles while they are standing beside Trafalgar Square, you could show up in the results and have them visit your store for a cup of java or mug of early grey.
• #3 SEO Tip for Google Goggles:
  Get your list of related keywords and search terms together, compile multiple photos for each of those, assign keyword rich filenames to the images, upload to your site and place the keyword in both the alt tag and text immediately below the image on a webpage. Google has already admitted that they will interrogate their image database, so if you rank well in Google images already then you will have some type of image rank juice transferred through to Google Goggles.

That’s just some core tips to SEO for Google Goggles, I’ll be testing more methods from here in my quest to figure out what works well. I just love new technology and the challenge of figuring out something that will bring traffic and increased profits. Google Goggles fits both of those loves, so check back and subscribe to my feed if you’re also interested in how to optimize for Google Goggles.

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