If you’re an author looking to promote your book you need to read this post.For a couple of years now Google has been serving what it calls Universal search.  Meaning it’s mixing video, image, etc results and serving a “single, integrated set of search results.” Here’s a result I came across last week:

Google has known for quite awhile that listings with images next to them are more likely to get clicked on.  In fact, a couple of years ago they came out with a policy for their adsense publishers to discourage images next to the adsense blocks.  What this means if you’re an author with a book to promote is that you may have a grand opportunity for some exposure here.  If you want to learn more go to books.google.com

Be sure when you’re submitting your books to think about what keyword terms you want it to rank for and optimize for those terms.

For all you folks who wonder why I am not taking issue with Google putting an image next to its own link while not doing so for others it’s not that I am not taking notice it’s just not the focus of this post.