Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results? If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.



1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a red rose, use the key phrase 'red rose', instead of rose or flower, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

3. Use both the width and the height attributes for the image. If the image height is unknown, use the image width. You should always use the image width from a design standpoint. Unknown image width can break your horizontal layout forcing your web site visitors to scroll horizontally which is very annoying.

4. Don't use image1, image2, etc. for the image file names. Instead, Use descriptive names. For example, use red-rose for a red rose image file. You can use the same text that you use for the alt attribute. Just hyphenate the words if it is a key phrase.

5. Put some description texts just beneath the image. For example, 'a red rose blossoming in a quite morning' for the red rose image. Make the key word, red rose, bold. When Google displays the image in the image search result page, the result page will also display the texts surrounding the image.

6. Choose your anchor texts in links to images carefully. Instead of 'click here for larger image' as the text link to an image, you can use 'a large red rose picture is here' as the anchor text.

7. Put all your images in a root folder and, if you prefer, categorize your images in sub-folders under the root image folder. Make sure that your robot file does not limit access to the image folders. Use the img and src tags for images on your web pages. Avoid all types of java script tricks. Goolge search engine spider will be able to index all your images. If you have descriptive image files names, they will have high relevancy in Google image search results.

8. Use Google trends to find hot topics. Use your creativity to establish a credible relevancy between you images and the hot trends. For example, if 'Hunt for Red October' is the hot topic, you can use 'Hunt for Red October Rose' as your image text.

9. You should already have your website verified by Google. If Google has not verified your website, go ahead and get it done by opening an account for Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have your site verified, enable enhanced image search for your site by logging into Google Webmaster Tools.