How to get traffic from Google Images

Google Images can drive a surprising amount of traffic to your website or blog and it's much easier to get good rankings in the Image search results than the normal results. The majority of visitors arriving from Google Images won't want to read your pages or buy any products - they are just looking for an image to use on their web page, PC or blog post. Over 500 people have already downloaded the script to use Google Images to build links so clearly people are getting traffic from Google Images already and want to make the most of it.

Getting good rankings in Google Images isn't actually very hard. The first thing to do is make sure you have the basic page elements in place so that Google can figure out what your images are likely to contain. Search engines are experimenting with using software to detect the contents of your images but until this is fully operational they are reliant on using the rest of the page to determine what the image shows.

The key elements that search engines use are the page title tag, alt text of the image, filename of the image, title tag of the image and the text immediately surrounding the image. A good example would be a blog post with the page title "Paris Hilton goes to prison" and an image with the following html code:



The image should be placed either at the beginning or after the first paragraph of the post for maximum effect.
The long tail of image search
While some keywords can attract a lot of traffic (especially in the adult industry) the best way to take advantage of Google Images is by ranking on the first page for thousands of image searches. This is very hard for new sites unless they are some kind of web shop with lots of products so the key is to concentrate on making sure the site is as well optimised for image search as possible so it will gain good results in the future.

A lot of web shop software programs are quite poor in terms of general SEO but they fare even worse for image search optimisation. You would need to make sure all the images have alt text and keyword filled filenames and make changes where appropriate.
Choosing an image size
There is no "one size fits all" solution for Google Images, you need to consider what type of images your visitor will be looking for and size your images accordingly. Visitors searching for web icons will want much smaller images than people looking for Britney spears wallpaper. Check out the results for the search term you are targeting and look at the sizes of the other images. I prefer to make my images towards the larger end of the scale so that visitors are not disappointed to see a low quality small image that they can't use.

Maximising your traffic
The Google Images search results are laid out in a very clear way so the user can see straight away which image they are looking for and whether it is the right size for their application. To make the most of your Google Images rankings you need to make sure that your image is the best one on the page and that it stands out from all the others in some way.

To illustrate this point check the rankings for the iPhone image results. Bearing in mind the searchers are likely to want a picture of the shiny new Apple iPhone the companies with pictures of fake iPhone prototypes are likely to be getting a much lower click through rate than the number 1 result from Gizmodo which shows 2 images of the iPhone in a good quality image. If you have good rankings in Google Images don't be afraid to alter the image or (keeping the dimensions the same) replace it with a better or more interesting one. The image search results take a while to update so it might take some weeks before the new image shows but the results or changing the image can be quite impressive.
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