7 Ways to Optimize for Google Images

Another traffic source from Google that many webmasters tend to forget about optimizing for is Google images. About just as many visitors come from Google images than from just text searches. Optimizing for Google images is an another great free traffic source to get free targeted visitors, just as you would get free targeted visitors from picture networks like Flickr or Photobucket.

1. Add the the pharse, “alt=(description)” within your picture. This is so search engines can see what the photo is about. Also, it is a good practice to add alts because if a picture doesn’t load, the description from the alt tag will show up instead.
2. Have the right image size. Google categories their images in large, medium, and small. If a term is too hard to rank for via Google images, you can try to rank first for another category like medium or small.
3. Renaming your images. Renaming your images is an important practice, it acts like a permalink in a website. You wouldn’t want an URL that said 00750653.jpg would you? If your picture is about a yellow balloon, then rename it and call it a yellow balloon because Google doesn’t know what the picture is about.
4. Add a title to it. Adding a title to an image is like adding a headline to a post. You wouldn’t ever make a post and name it blank would you? It is very important in terms of wanting to have your image to rank for relevancy in the search engine.
5. Use hyperlinked keywords targeted to the URL with the photo alone. This hopes to build backlinks to the photo and to help it rank as it would help websites rank. It is no different. An URL is an URL.
6. Simply add tags. We have a blog post dedicated as to why tagging is important. This also applies to Google Images as well.
7. Last, but not least, make sure your image file is accessible for Google bots to crawl them. If it is hidden in multiple files, it is bound to not even be in the search engine. Keeping your pictures accessible as you would with regular posts is important to getting your pictures indexed and ready to go in Google’s picture database.

Optimizing is the easy part, but remembering and link building is the hardest part. As you would want to try to rank high with in-text searches, all the rules still apply to Google images as well. It is best to optimize for any free open traffic sources. I’ve even heard some stories as to Google images being their highest traffic generator, even more so than their regular text searches by over 20%.