People who pay a lot of attention to Search Engine Optimization often neglect a branch of it called Image Search Optimization, which is composed of techniques to get the images on your site ranked high in Google, Yahoo, Bing and other engines’ Image Search.
That’s not a very good thing, as image search is constantly growing and as of 2009, it accounts for 10% of Google’s daily 200 million searches, which is quite an impressive number. And as there is much less competition, you can get your images and site ranking high pretty quickly.
When users perform an image search and click on a results page image, they see your site right under Google’s (for example) toolbar, and many times, if you have some good headlines or images there, they will stay (probably after viewing or copying the image they wanted).
SEO Tips of Images On Your Site
Amazon, for example, gets a few million visits per month from users searching for book covers or product screenshots. This is quite amazing considering they would’ve had those images there anyway.
So how can you get a piece of the 20 million daily image searches? Here are the best (and pretty much the only) tips and techniques to help you:
Set proper file names:
Don’t just name them randomly like “owkdej50bng.jpg”, so you can avoid duplicates. Name the file with the keywords you want it to rank for and/or with the name of the object that is displayed. For example, an image of a Nissan GTR sports car should be named “Nissan-GTR-sports-car”. You can use either hyphens, underscores or even spaces to separate words, as Google acknowledges them all as separators, although the latter would probably not stand well with Apache server (and Linux in general) and some older browsers. This is the most important thing to get your images ranked well, but some established sites get away with using just relevant keywords around the image on the page (Amazon is the best example of this).
Use all the image attributes:
This will not only help Search Engines rank your images correctly, but will also make them compliant with W3C requirements. You’ll have to use the “title” (title of the image), “alt” (alternative text to be displayed in case the image cannot be shown), “width” and “height” (to tell search engines and other bots the size of your image) attributes together to be fully compliant. This may be a little difficult to implement if you are not a programmer, but you can always search for a good plugin if you are using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or OS Commerce. Search engines pay attention to W3C compliancy, so it will further increase you chance to rank higher for any keyword.
Surrounding text and alternative text:
The text in the immediate vicinity of the image and the content of the page in general influence an image’s ranking (again, the best example is Amazon with their random image names and missing attributes). That makes sense, as an image of a car on a health care blog would be really out of context, and therefore would not rank well. But if you have the same image on a car blog, it will show up much higher on the results page. The “alt” attribute is also considered as “surrounding text” by Google, and also plays an important role. Generally, you would have the same text in the “alt” attribute as you would in the image name. For example, the “alt” text for “Nissan-GTR-sports-car.jpg” would be something like “The Nissan GTR Sports Car”.
Image Resolution:
This doesn’t play a very important role for Search Engines (as long as your image is normal sized, not 20×20 pixels), but it does for humans. People who search for an image want to see it big and clear, not at a 150×150 pixels resolution. Most people navigate away as fast as they can click when they see such an image 
, as it does not present anything important and it just irritates them. How can you discern a car’s rims, for example, in such a small image? But, from a site owner’s perspective, if you insert a big image directly into your page, it will take a lot more time to load and will consume too much bandwidth. The best solution here is to have 2 images – one smaller sized that you would insert on the page, and a bigger one that will be linked from it. This way you’ll save bandwidth when people read your article and just take a quick look at the image and you’ll please people who want to take a closer look at it.
Link anchor text:
This is directly relevant to the above point, but can also be used in some other cases. If you link from the small image to the bigger one, you should use an anchor like “Large version of Nissan GTR sports car image” instead of just “Enlarge” or “Bigger version”. This will help both your images get a higher ranking due to relevancy. Another example – if you’re linking to an article related to the image, you should use “A review of the Nissan GTR sports car” instead of “Link” or “The article”. And unlike the image attributes, most CMS software allows you to insert an anchor text by default, without using any plugins.
That’s about all you can do to get your images and site ranking high on Image Search. There are a few other, less known and unverified methods, but these are the ones you’ll really need.
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