By Aaron Curtiss. Aaron is an internal tools developer assisting the Search Quality department in Searchme’s efforts to improve relevance and classification.

According to Wikipedia, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it ‘ranks’, the more searchers will visit that site.”

It’s that last sentence that’s interesting, because with a visual interface like Searchme, it’s not quite the same ‘punishment’ if your site is ranked 9th or 10th instead of 1st or 2nd.

With visual search, people are more likely to get to your site in a set of search results and more able to determine if it’s the one they need, even if it’s not in the top five results. This is because visual search lets people scroll through web pages extremely quickly and identify the relative strength of a site, often without reading a single word. They can see instantly whether or not a site is what they want, because the visual representation of a site has higher information yield than page titles and snippets. This means that users are more likely to get the result they want the first time they click through, instead of going back and forth on text-only links, so they can afford to scroll through more results.

What effect might this have on SEO? Much remains to be seen, but it’s safe to say that the authoritative and traditional definition given above will no longer suffice. When users can actually see whether a page will most likely answer their search query, the meaning of relevance changes.

One outcome that users could hope for is that designers and optimizers will start to aim not just for page rank, but for more effective visual communication of a site’s information. Visual search could promote a more holistic and multi-dimensional approach to SEO, one that brings users closer to the overall content and purpose (and quality) of a site, more quickly.

In sum, visual search is changing SEO, and we’re excited about the ways in which visual information is going to play a role in improving relevance and getting people to the information they want more quickly.