The SEO Hobbyist

As mentioned in previous posts, patience is a virtue when dealing with SEO. If you are lucky, some site changes you make can show results in Google Search after a few days/weeks. In my personal experience, it can take months before you notice the effects of Google Image Optimization. I personally run a few media/picture websites because I’ve noticed that the page views as well as time on site  is astronomically high. One example of this is my site http://randomfunnypicture.com, which averages 15+ page views per user.  It is actually the main reason on why I decided to write this post. If I break that page’s web stats down by referrer, my most active traffic comes from image search (25-35 pages per visitor).

Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that will help you increase your Google Image Search traffic.

1) Provide ALT Text For <IMG> Image Tags

Why is ALT Text Important? ALT Text is one of the most important because without it, Google’s search bots have no idea what the actual content of the picture is.  How else would you expect your site to be returned in an image search if your content isn’t properly labeled? Of all these tips, I’d say this one is most important because not only does it help you get your images indexed, but it also gives you an opportunity to adjust the keyword density on your site. You have the ability (WHEN RELEVANT) to use the keywords you are trying to rank highest on as your image descriptions. A Win/Win Situation.

2) Add Title Information to <IMG> Image Tags

Just like ALT Text, Title Text is another great opportunity to increase the density of your target keywords. What makes Title Text arguably even more important, is that many social media sites will auto-detect this information during submission/linking. For example, if you are submitting an image to Digg or Facebook, if you fill in the title tag it will automatically be entered into the description. Even at a minimum, this could be just another free relevant back link for traffic generating methods you are probably already using.

3) Choose Relevant File Names For Your Images

This one is a little bit simpler. Just as having a relevant domain name and URL are important to regular SEO, the same goes for file name. Choose a name that is highly descriptive of the content.

4) Provide Height and Width Data  to Your <IMG> Image Tags

Using the previous tips, an example of an SEO Image tag would be:

<img src=http://www.example.com/very-descriptive-name.jpg width=”433″ height=”600″ title=”Just as Descriptive Title”>

The reason for this is to help prepare your images for Google Image Search’s Advanced Options.

These Include:

› Medium
› Large
› Icon
› Larger than…
› Exactly…

If your dimensions are already included in your tags, it will be indexed faster and contain the right image information to be returned in when users perform these advanced searches.

5)  Surround Images with Relevant Keywords

Another way Google Image Search indexes pictures is by analyzing the content directly around images. If you can provide relevant keywords surrounding the image, it will help that picture get indexed correctly. When possible, I even use the <CAPTION> tag which makes it clear to search engines what the image is about.

Follow the steps above and your image search referrals will increase I guarantee it. Not only that, but you might also be pleasantly surprised about how much image search you get from Google’s foreign TLD’s (top level domains).

Not just images.google.com, but also

images.google.co.uk
images.google.ca
images.google.de
images.google.com.au etc…

Image search is responsible for 10% (and growing) of my overall traffic on my network and has way higher pages/visit and time on site than other traffic sources.