Google has around 10 billion images in its search index and its growing at a fast rate. As of 2010, the Google image search is getting 1 billion page views per day.  So these figures indicate the importance of the image SEO or the Search Engine Optimization of images in your blog. Usually bloggers are seen concentrating more on the normal search engine traffic that has the best conversion rates. But you can get more people to your website, just by taking an extra attention at the images posted inside your content. Here we have a few image SEO tips that you would find useful.

Images SEO tips

1. Name images correctly:  Be it on Blogger or WordPress platform, the most important part of the image SEO is the naming. We usually process and upload mobile, camera or web images directly to our blog without caring about how it is named. Make sure that the  image includes targeted keywords with _ or – separating words. The image format is not a problem, but it seems that  .JPG is widely preferred. An image with the proper name will get more preference from search engines than a RAW image.

2. Fill  ALT and Captions:  Alt tag means alternative tags. These tags are used by search engines to recognize images. A simple implementation of an ALT tab is given below.


Here the text filed between alt=”" gives a rough idea of the image to the search engines and they will position it accordingly. Moreover, people using a text-only browser or a screen reader can easily understand the image details by reading these tags.  If you are on Google Blogger platform, you have to add ALT tags manually after uploading images. It can be done from the the HTML editor after uploading the image. In WordPress you have options to add ALT tags right from the image uploader.

3.  Position the image inside or nearer to an article formatted within the SEO rules.

4. Link to the image with anchor text as the required keyword.


5. In WordPress, check your robots.txt file and make sure that your images are allowed to get indexed. If you are using Blogger, there is another step to make your images SEO friendly and available in the search engines. Many of the bloggers suing blogspot.com doesn’t know that their images are automatically uploaded to Google Picasa. Usually these images are private and held as unlisted. To make them public, go to any album on Picasa> Edit> album properties> Now select public and save. You can label each image in the album section for more search engine visibility.

6. Edit and crop images to avoid duplicates: The search engines are now powerful than it was before. Google Image Search has several options that let you choose images based on color, type and other factors. Also there are some services like Google Goggles that let you search the web by taking a photo of an object. So that means, Google knows the properties of all existing images in its search index. So when you’re copying an image from Google search, crop it and add text and other details to make it stand-out from other copies.
The above given are some of the best on-page image SEO techniques to get better rankings. However, the actual position of the images in search may vary depending upon the incoming links to page, website quality, Home page PageRank and many other factors.  You can build external links by bookmarking images to Digg, Reddit, Mixx and other similar services.