Google Images is an amazing way to grab extra traffic to your website. You may wonder how Google knows when to display image results and when they should not. It’s actually amazingly simple in all reality, however not many understand this topic.

I was building links the other day and requested a link from someone. They requested a link back (of course), within their reciprocal link exchange request they asked me to link to an image. After thinking about it, out of curiosity, I asked if this was to improve google image results.  The answer was yes!

This website managed to obtain top Google Image results for the term Logo Design.

When images appear in Google’s results, heavy placement depends on 2 major factors which fall in to normal SEO rules. 

• The image file name should be keyword rich. Picture1.jpg won’t perform as well as logo_design.jpg
• Include the keyword you are focusing on within an inbound link to your image.
• Place the image on your website, and surround it with keyword rich text, also add Alt text to the image specifying what it is.

So, let’s say you wanted a picture of your dog to appear under the Google search phrase “Dog Pictures” since it is searched 50,000 times per month in Google, and you really want your dog to be popular. You would simply snap a picture of your dog, then you should name your file something like dog_pictures.jpg – After creating this image, you need to obtain links to it from other relevant website’s. The more links the better!.  The link pointing to your image should include the anchor text Dog Pictures as well. So your link should look like this – Dog Pictures

If you decide to create links to your image using a thumbnail of your image, make sure that you use the ALT text “Dog Pictures” for the image attributes.

Hopefully this post has helped your ambitions for getting your puppy’s picture to the top. 

Joel McLaughlin

Phoenix SEO, Search Engine Optimization