Future of Search Engine Optimization for Images

This morning I read an article from WebProNews titled “Patent for Google: Teaching Robots to Read” , which states that two of Google engineers have files a patent application with World Intellectual Property Organization and the main idea of the patent goes around the concept of “Recognizing text in images”.

It quotes an InformationWeek report as
“The method includes receiving an input of one or more image search terms and identifying keywords from the received one or more image search terms,” said the patent abstract.”

“The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image.”

Now, once Google gets the ability to extract and read texts from images and with the increasing availability of high speed internet and increasing bandwidth, it would probably reduce the eternal clash between web designers and SEO and the SEO s would definitely be more open to having their headings and other important texts done up in fancy images.

We would also need to see whether this technology would be effective in identifying objects in images without the help of alt attributes or surrounding keywords.

Successful implementation of this technology by Google is sure to initiate a lot of changes in the way WWW works today.