Use good images to explain your product.  Both Google & Yahoo have good , use it to your advantage.   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

I don't spend a lot of time doing es as I don't have a need for many of them in what I do. But it is a way that people search for products at times. Wouldn't it make sense for a webmaster to use good images to explain with one picture, what the product or service was about? Don't ignore people who do base their purchasing on image. Some will only buy from a company that looks good online. So it's important to have good images that explain your product or service. They don't have to be professionally done but should be accurate to what you offer. 

The old cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Never has this been more true than in the online world. People search for products sometimes based on images they find in the major search engines. There are only two right now that are mainstream and make it easy to find an image or surf according to images. I find that if I'm looking for something to buy online, the image index of the major search engines, Google and Yahoo, can help me find a good match.

I did an for "Lincoln" on both Yahoo & Google and here are the resulting pages. Notice how Yahoo has a cleaner, more uniform appearance to the images.

It only confirms what I'm believing that Yahoo is just a little bit better than Google in it's results and in it's appearance. Yahoo has been doing a very nice job in creating better search for the average person.

A9.com, Amazon's search engine does it a little differently. They provide images as a sidebar in any search you do. They obviously understand the importance of images when finding something online.

So what should a website owner do to get or create good pictures? First of all, if you sell a product that is manufactured, see if you can get permission to use that manufacturers images. A lot of times they don't care who uses them as long as you give credit. I once had an experience where we sold a company's product and they had a problem that we used their images to sell the product. How shortsighted and stupid. Shortly thereafter we stopped selling the product. They lost a lot of business. Here was a case where the manufacturer didn't want to promote the product by letting others use the product images! If you make a product, make the images freely available to your distributor network. You will sell more product. So get images and permission so you don't have to create all your own images.

If you do have to create your own images, you can get good results by using your digital camera and a good neutral background. It doesn't have to be fancy, it should just explain what the product or service is in a photograph. People don't always expect studio quality photographs when they have a need to fill. They just want to know that this is your product and they can make a decision based on a clear picture of what they see. 

If searchers are looking for a particular item you sell, then give them a good, consistent image of what it is. With search engines doing more to display images, you may find the future is full of people who search for products or services based on an image.