I have a colleague who runs a popular site with over 15 million page views a month. In speaking with him over the weekend, I was asking about his most popular sources of traffic, one of my favorite SEO topics. The first two, overwhelmingly, were direct navigation and the Google, followed by what you would expect.
But the source at #10 was surprising. Google image search. It’s funny how integrated (and popular) it’s become in our daily web habits, yet mostly overlooked in terms of SEO and traffic. I’ve been doing some digging around Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman’s talk at SES to get some numbers to share with you.
He stated that an incredible 300 million digital photos are taken every day. 100 billion images taken per year. Pittman also stated there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.
That’s pretty staggering. And this is a trend that will likely see continued hockey-stick growth.
Image optimization has been important ever since Google unveiled Universal (or blended) Search.
Check out these above the fold results for Pete Rose:
That’s seven, count em, seven quality image slots that are likely driving a nifty amount of traffic to their respective owners. There have been plenty of studies done to show that images not only increase click-throughs, but consumer engagement as well. You can imagine how well this would work for ecommerce sites.
I don’t need to write a treatise on how to rank in Google for images but allow me to share some best practices.
Always include alt attributes in your <img source> tags. Name the image files appropriately and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. Overall site authority and PageRank will obviously be important here as well.
A f ew other low-hanging fruit tactics are to add images to your Google Local Business profile. You can also enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Try to add images to local business citation sources whenever possible. Include images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.
And one last crucial tidbit to keep in mind. Pittman stated, “If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high.” So remember folks, using high quality imagery pays off for both user experience and SEO.
There’s much more to speak of on this topic but it shall have to wait for another post. Hopefully today, we’ve given you some insight into the importance of image search.
