How To Search Engine Optimize For Google Image Search

After my post earlier today I had a couple questions asking for more detail about SEO for Google Image Search. I Thought I would do a quick post with some quick and easy steps, by no means will I ever claim to be an SEO expert but I do think there are many basic rules you can live by to give yourself a solid chance at success.

Here are the things to look at:

Image File Name - Make sure you name the file based on the keywords you are optimizing for, in other words if the page is about iPhone App Reviews do your keyword research to determine the optimal words to put in file name. The easy way to look at this is it is not much different than the file name for the actual site page.

An example, and Aron will hate me for this (Sorry Aron) but search Google for Aron Meystedt or click here. You will see I rank on the page first based on my file name of the image when I did the interview with Aron.

Also, a little tip that seems to work but if you look around you will see much debate on, is using dashes in a file name rather than running the words together, i.e. Bruce-Marler rather than BruceMarler. I try to use dashes.

Content On Page - The content and surrounding information on the page around the photo is taken into account by Google as well, this will have an effect on how your images rank. In otherwords, do not try to scam Google by ranking high for an image name for Debt Consolidation on a page about iPhones.

Title Tag - The next thing is to make sure you have the title tag set an based on the keywords you are optimizing for, here is an example:

<img src=”http://YourSite.com/Keywords-Here.jpg” alt=”Keyword Focused Description.” title=”Keyword Based Title” />

This is something quick and easy to do and CMS software like Wordpress has a place to insert this text when uploading a picture making it really easy.

Alt Text Tag - You can see in the above example that the "alt" tag is also set based on keywords, this is the text that show if the image does not load or the browser does not support showing images.

Although there is also debate about how much emphasis Google puts on these tags, any extra edge you can get is important. Set them and you may of given yourself just enough juice to move higher.

I hope this helps answer some of the questions. Good luck!

Google Images SEO And Other Quirks

If you are not taking the time to optimize your image titles for SEO reasons then you are not taking advantage of the love that Google gives back for that little bit of work.

We recently did a spot check on some of our customers websites looking at traffic, keyword rankings, and other things. One of the things we noticed was that a couple of our customers sites were getting large amounts of traffic when we really did not expect it, these were customers in very targeted niche areas and the customers had really done little to nothing to add content to their sites since we had turned them over so although they were ranking well for the terms they had been optimized for they really should of had minimal growth except for some long tail terms.

As you can imagine as we scanned the Awstats logs it did not take long to figure out what was happening, in one case for a very highly searched term the customer ranked in the number one position in Google images for the term. This was a nice surprise and what was nice is the pageviews did not trend downward as I would of expected based on the typical bounce rate you expect on images. So, based on this picture and the quality of it the users were actually taking the time to look at the website.

As I continued to look through the stats of other sites I noticed something else, on one of another of our customers sites traffic had increased more than I would of expected since he had only had it up for less than 3 weeks. We had given him a tip sheet for what to do when he added content, etc and it looks like he actually used it which is a great thing. When adding images and content he took the time to optimize the image names, titles, etc and based on this sure enough his traffic was moving up nicely.

I know many people discount the quality of traffic from Google image search but to me every visitor is a potential customer.

One little quirk I noticed, and I know most of you have probably had this happen, we were turning up a few Geo niche sites and one of them had not even gotten past the initial Wordpress default Hello World page but was ranking on the first page for a rather competitive niche term. Sometimes Google makes me want to scream, it cracks me up how we can spend so much time sometimes on less competitive niches and take forever to show up but on a site that we have done nothing on there we are, first page.