A New Traffic Source: Image Search

September 22nd, 2008 • seo

Google Image Search Results For Russell Crowe

It’s said that about %15 of total search volume comes from image search. Whether it’s true or not, image search will have a great impact on your traffic if you include a couple of optimized images. After your images indexed by search engines you’ll see more visitors came from image search. Probably you’ll see lines like (http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=<image url>&imgrefurl=<your url>&….. ) in your analytics results.

Image search optimization requires much less effort than normal search engine optmization, since there’s not much work to do. Here is a check list for image search optimization:

• Name your images properly: There’s only a couple of ways that you can provide some description about your images to search engines. One is the image name. It’s very important to name your images properly. You should always use some descriptive keywords (holiday.jpg) rather than a set of weird characters (DC00001.jpg). Also consider providing multiple word names where words are separated by a hyphen(-) and not by a underscore (_). a-green-tree.jpg is much better than a_green_tree.jpg, agreentree.jpg or DC00001.jpg. As a general note, do not over use this. Use no more than 4 hyphens.
• Use proper ‘alt‘ attribute for your images: Another way to provide some description is providing some text in alt attribute of img tag. Always fill alt attributes, do not leave them empty. I repeat, do not over use this too. A not too short and not too long alt with words correctly spelled would be perfect. I prefer to use 4-10 word sentences as alt tag, but at least one word would be good too.
• Text before and after the image: This is the last chance for you to provide a clue about your image. Search engines will use the text around your images as description. So spend some words to describe your image.
• Use high quality images (high resolution): Most search engines will prefer high quality images, so it’s important to use high resolution images.
• Original Content: Original content is always valuable. If you have a tree image just use that, do not find one on the internet. Of course there’s no harm in using that but using a unique image is a better idea then using an image that has already been listed in thousands of sites.
• Share Your Images: You can share your images on sites like Flickr and Picasa. But do not forget to put a link to your site.
• Robots.txt: Make sure that robots can reach the directory where your images are stored.
• Google Webmaster Tools: Check the “I would like to enable enhanced image search on my site and am authorized to opt into this advanced service.” option under the “Tools > Enhanced Image Search” menu in Google Webmaster Tools.

Have I missed something? Probably. But anyway, this list will be a good starting point for you. Just try to put some images on your site and you’ll see it’s benefits in a short time. Of course you can change the above list a little and use some popular keywords in alt attributes, image names etc. That could help as well. Also you can see how well your images do for a specific keyword by using the ’site:’ query parameter in Google. Try this: site:runseorun.com Russell Crowe. Oh no results! May be one day I’ll get some.

Tags: flickr, image, image search, image search engine, image search optimization, images, picassa, search, search engine, search engine optimization, search engine ranking, search engine submission, seo, tips, website traffic

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