How Google Might Rank Image Search Results - SEO by the Sea

We are seeing more references to machine learning in how Google is ranking pages and other documents in search results. That seems to be a direction that will leave what we know as traditional, or old school signals that are referred to as ranking signals behind. It's still worth considering some of those older ranking signals because they may play a role in how things are ranked. As I was going through a new patent application from Google on ranking image search results, I decided that it was worth including what I used to look at when trying to rank images. Images can rank highly in image search, and they can also help pages that they appear upon rank higher in organic web results, because they can help make a page more relevant for the query terms that page may be optimized for.