How to use Google Image search to improve traffic for SEO

Google Image Search can be a very effective way of driving improved traffic to your website particularly for images heavy websites. There is some debate as to whether this type of traffic will convert well for e-commerce sites but this strategy can be very powerful for general content and news sites.

Here is a summary the steps to optimise your images for Google Image Search;

1)      Use Descriptive Filenames – Title the image with a word or short phrase which best describes what is in the image. Using hyphens in the file name to isolate the words in the description, this is commonly interpreted by Google as a space in the filename..

2)      Use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is a important step for boosting SEO perfomance as the alt tags allow you to reinforce the key terms within the content. Also be aware that there is a huge amount of search volumes that includes words like: photo, picture, image, pics, pix, or locations. Image ALT tags also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people using text readers.

3)      Follow on page SEO best practices here. For example:

 Include key-words into title tag of the web page

 Include key-words into text next to the image

 Include key-words into the overall theme of the content of the page

4)      Use the Google Image Labeller to label images and help improve the quality of Google's image search results. http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/   

5)      Use Google Webmaster Tools and opt in for GOOGLE IMAGES to monitor performance and indexing.