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.