[Tips] Ranking Pictures in Google Images

There's a little info out there on this, but I wanted to share my thoughts. I couldn't find a lot of information when I first looked into it.

You can get decent traffic from Google images. Obviously it depends on the keyword. "Flowers" will probably get you more image searches than "buy a computer or scrapebox".

It is often overlooked by a lot of people, and it really shouldn't, it only takes a few seconds to optimize for Google, and if you aren't doing it, there are millions who aren't, so why not start doing it and get some extra traffic.

I have roughly 250+ (with 50+ domains still needing sites) websites up, and every single one has atleast one image on the front page (besides header). 120 of the sites are one page EMD sites, another 70 are 4-5 EMD sites that drive traffic to my money site. I take the time to add one good image to every single homepage. I am ranking at the top for a lot of keywords... I don't actually track it, but for example, I just looked up my six biggest keywords which get 90,000+ exacts per month, and I have the number one image for all six keywords. Plus I've come across several others ranking #1 which just searching.

Some of the tips you may not, some you may not, but I thought I'd share my complete checklist.

1. Name the image the keyword, keyword.jpg, keyword.gif or magictool.png if you are using more than one image.

2. Use keyword in alt tags. Don't keyword stuff it like they used to say to do back in the day, make it real. "keyword header" "picture of keyword", though I'll use "buy keyword" sometimes too. And of course, make sure you have the width and height of the image.

3. Put the image in your content very close to the keyword, using 'align' or 'float' in your html.

4. Make your image width end with zero. I usually make the images anywhere from 270px to 390px, height I don't care as much about. This step is actually very important.

5. If you're just stealing an image, don't just resize the image to the above widths, but crop it so it's not the same ratio as the original image. I think like content Google doesn't want to list a ton of the same images, and if you just resize, they can still tell it's the same image, so we want to try and make it look like a unique image. (Note: Google has reverse image search which means they do have technology to find similar images, but who knows if they use it for Google images)

6. If you can "flip" the image horizontally, do it. What I mean is, if there are no numbers, letters, etc that won't be reversed if you flip it, flip the image. This is just another step to making it look like a unique image.

7. Don't aim to optimize your header. Though I've noticed a couple headers ranking, I think you should aim for an in content image. As mentioned earlier, you could name your header keyword.png then name your other image keyword.jpg.

#5 and #6 are more so just theories of mine, but it only takes two seconds to do, so why not.

And of course, build links to the page it's on. Most my sites rank high, so I'm sure that counts as some trust, however, none of them are ranked #1, so I don't think it's a HUGE factor... but I think think it is a factor.

So there are my tips. It takes about a minute to do, so why not take the minute, when very few others are?