o over the last few years I have been using Google Images to drive traffic to a numerous number of web properties for my own projects and also for client related project I work on.
An example looking at one of my personal websites from last year we see some decent levels of traffic coming in from Google Image search!
Now you may ask how do I get more traffic from Google Images? Well here are 10 decent tips to get more traffic from Google images:
Tip 1. Always make sure you name the file of the image related to the product, example an image of Sydney call it sydney.jpg, you can also be more detailed in the way you name images, but only be descriptive with images to name them what they are do not go overboard naming images with words which do not relate to the image.
Tip 2. Always make sure you use ALT text on high quality images, you do not have to go and label alt text on every single button on your website, but if you have a high quality image make sure that you use a descriptive ALT text on the image.
Tip 3. Track what your competitors are doing on Google Image search, this is a decent tactic to see how many images on Google your competitors have indexed type in the syntax “site:competitorurl.com” for example. (to do this you need to switch your version of Google to the basic search version, see below) Also search for images which are high in traffic and review the page content around that image look for the common factors which equate to ranking for the specific image, reverse engineer what your competitors are doing.
Tip 4. On the page where you have the image make sure that you have detailed information which is related to that image, I have noticed that pages where they are content rich and related to the specific image perform well.
Tip 5. If you want share the image URL via 3rd party sites for example you can upload the image to new websites and link back to the main URL as a “source”. This way you can build image links to the image as image attribution.
Tip 6. Use reverse image search to find people who are taking your image content and ask them to link back to the original image source or page source page where the image is hosted. A great service to do reverse image searching with is Tiny Eye – www.tineye.com
Tip 7. From my testing medium-higher quality image work better for image search listings. It is advisable to make sure that you use images which are not distorted too because if you want people to share your image content then it has to be high quality.
Tip 8. High level of social sharing from an on page element can have a positive impact on the image SEO for the website. So be sure to implement social sharing of the image for example Facebook Like buttons, Twitter Tweet button and the capability to share the image on image sites such as Pinterest.
Tip 9. Keyword Research for image search is another tactic you can implement, you can use the image trend/ related terms in Google Trends under the image search section: http://www.google.com/trends/
Tip 10. Be sure to tag images with watermarks always, I have noticed with some web properties I own if people steal your content and share it on social networks you can still get direct type in traffic from the image.
