The world’s #1 searchengine offers an image search function since 2001. Millions of people use it every single day to search for images. Do you see an opportunity? If yes, read on…

What’s more interesting about Google is that the images that get indexed in their database are often displayed in regular search result pages – like in the following example:

Google search results often include images

In the example above, a search for Burj Al Arab (one of the world’s most expensive hotels) returned among the first results a series of images.

How would you like to see one of your photos show up in the first results of a search engine?

Flickr and Google Image Search: a case study

If you’ve ever visited the capital of Scotland, you probably heard about a famous place called Mary King’s Close. Someone took a picture of it and uploaded it on Flickr. After a few months, the photographer noticed a lot of traffic coming to that image. Having a Pro account, he immediately checked the referral stats (i.e. where the visits were coming from). And, to his surprise, he found out that most of his traffic came from Google and Yahoo. Here’s a screenshot of his stats:

No less than 88% of this image's traffic came from Google, while only 4% of the visits originated on Flickr...

So the question is…

How Do You Optimize Your Images for Google?

In order to get the best answer to this question, I read 4 SEO articles about image optimization:

• Optimizing for Google Image Search
• Google Image Search Optimization: Paris Hilton Pics
• Case Study: Google Image Search and Marissa Mayer
• Search Engine Placement Using Google Image Search

Apparently, it’s not rocket science. It all comes down to the following elements: image file name, ALT tag, the text that surrounds the image and links.

Here’s the dissection:

• image file name: in Flickr, you have no influence upon it, so you might as well forget about it and concentrate on the other factors
• ALT tag: the alt tag contains the actual title of the image and your Flickr screen name. Be careful when selecting a title for your image – make it as relevant as you can.
• text surrounding the image: this includes the title (displayed above), the image description, the tags and the geotag. Focus as much attention as you can on making them relevant. Use a tool like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to dig some good quality keywords and use them wisely on the page.
• links referencing to your image: now that’s really important. Try to post links directly to the image you want to optimize on other websites – discussion forums, blog comments, and any other places. One example would be posting samples of photos taken with a particular lens on a review website (check out this page and read some of those reviews to see what I’m talking about…)

One more thing to bear in mind: try not to go for the oversaturated niches (like: “Eiffel Tower” or “Barrack Obama”), but rather for keywords where the likelihood of having lots of competition is minimal (like in our example: “Mary King’s Close” in Edinburgh).

What You Should Know About Search Engine Traffic

• Most users coming from searchengines don’t have Flickr accounts. The photo in our case study has been viewed 4,900 times in just a few months, yet it has been faved only twice – also, it has accumulated an impressive number of 2 comments! Don’t expect too many Flickr-specific benefits.
• Photos that become famous on the internet are often copied and used without permission. If you want to prevent your image from being misused, here are some minimal precautions to take:
  • Make sure you marked it as copyrighted in Flickr
  • State your copyright terms explicitly in the photo’s description (”This image is copyrighted. Do not use it without permission.“)
  • Watermark your photo.
• Visitors coming from searchengines tend to leave as quickly as they come.
  • To really leverage this traffic, make sure you point the direction to the right target.