Google Image
From ThaiiS Note (Wiki)
Introduction to Google Image Search Optimization
Google Image Search optimization is not a difficult process and only requires that you pay attention to how you label and use your images within the regular framework of your website. A lot of image optimization involves basic search optimization factors such as the inclusion of relevant keywords in the content, title and meta tags.
All of the articles I’ve read on the topic of Google Images optimization seem to be in common agreement and they offer similar suggestions, although a few of them do highlight some different methods of utilizing Google Image Search.
19 Ways to Get More Traffic Using Google Image Search
I’ve made a full list of all the methods I’ve come across so that all of you can have an accessible reference point, should you decide to use Google Images as a method to drive more traffic to your website.
Also added are a few points of my own, specifically dealing with how targeting specific image topics and integrating them within your webpages can help to attract a great deal more traffic through Google images.
Depending on your niche and images used, you’ll be able to attract a great deal of extra visitors easily with very little additional work. I highly recommending putting at least a few of these points into practice on your own website.
Here is the list of Google image optimization tips in full:
1. Insert keywords into your Alt Text.
Here’s an example: <img src="filename.gif" alt="Alt description goes here">
2. Name your Images with Descriptive Titles.
‘lindsay-lohan.jpg’'‘b473.jpg’
3. Use relevant text around your images.
4. Use Adsense to assess overall content relevance.
Change your content until the Adsense units reflect the keywords you want to target. In my opinion, this is not only applies to Google images but is a generally helpful method as it improves your overall latent semantic indexing score and makes your site appear more relevant to Google for targeted key phrases or words.
5. Optimize Your Title and Meta tags.
6. Use anchor text keywords in links to images.
See here'Click for Full Size'Lindsay Lohan Picture'Lindsay Lohan in Rehab
7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images
8. Use Broad Categories of Images to Get a Larger Audience
9. Make Your Image folder accessible to search engines
10. Re-upload your pictures to maintain search freshness
11. Make your Google Images Standards-compliant.
fully compliant image reference
12. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Central.
Google Webmaster Toolsenhanced image search
13. Try out Google Image Labeler.
14. Use Javascript to prevent framing of your webpages
15. HotLink Images from Google Search
search results for Jessica AlbaMost of the images in the top row are hotlinked and actually rank better than the original image source. You should probably note that hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters because it leeches their bandwidth, not to mention that you might be violating copyrights as well.An alternative method of hotlinking is to hotlink Google’s cache itself. This short tutorial gives clear indication of how to do it but this method only allows you to use thumbnails, not to mention that some webmasters have reported seeing no results after trying this method.
16. Use Image Sizing to Target a Search Term.
17. Use Images about ‘Hot’ Topics.
18. Create a separate page and link to the page and image
I have not personally tried this but some have claimed that it helps both the regular search rank as well as the Image Search rank. See this page for the method in full.
19. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed
The easiest way to do this is to use a site search operator. For example, here is a list of images indexed on Boing Boing. Simply change boingboing.net to your url: http://images.google.com/images?q=site:boingboing.net
Converting Google Image Search Visitors
Getting traffic from Google Image Search is very nice but you’ll need some way of converting them into a customer or future reader. This can be quite difficult because visitors are likely to click away if after they find the image.
Here are some conversion tactics you can use:
- Place your image on a webpage with highly relevant content
- Link to other relevant webpages and image galleries
- Promote a special offer related to the product image that you’ve used
- Allow users to copy the image and paste it on their website (try this script)
- Include call to actions at the start and end of webpages
Try Experimenting with Google Image Search..
I’ve recently gotten a decent number of hits for a image which was experiencing seasonal surge in search queries for a specific term and I’m sure that the list of tips above will help you to get some extra traffic from Google Images as well.
You can start by first trying out a few images in your webpages or new blog posts to see if you actually get some traffic from it. Remember to monitor traffic through your stats package and tweak for optimum results.
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References
- Optimizing for Google Image Search (Points 3, 4 and 6)
- Optimizing Images for Search Engines (Points 7, 8, 9 and 10)
- How to Get Traffic from Google Images (Points 16)
- Using Google Image to Drive Traffic to Your Site (Point 13)