Matt Cutts talks on ALT attributes for describing images
Category: Google, SEO, SEO Image tips
This is an area I have been very involved in the past years - Getting images ranked in Google. And I can tell you that this area of SEO can return enormous fruits if done well. It is especially relevant if your site has useful images to offer to it users. Why not SEO those images correctly and have them rank in search engines to attract quality traffic to your site? Ranking images is also often much easier then ranking it the direct web search as there is a lot less competition.
As an example, take a look a a simple site I launched called Female Tattoos which is of course about female tattoos. I think you would agree that people performing a search in Google for ‘female tattoos’ would likely be looking for pictures of female tattoos and so often end up browsing Google images for pictures of female tattoos. My female tattoo site ranks in the first row for the term ‘female tattoos’ (often the first image - but this can vary on day of search and location) and from this gets a ton of traffic! (It’s also a very nice tattoo :))
Another nice example is the site I recently launched called Hawaii Flower which actually has two images on the first page of Google images for the keyword ‘Hawaii flower’. It is currently not to be found on the first page of Google for this keyterm (I think yahoo has it on first page though) but just the image listings along is good for hundreds of uniques every day!
If you get really luck (Luck is dictated by the quality of your SEO of course), then you may even get one of the three image spots Google sometimes displays above the web search results if the search is highly related to images. This often happens for my sites and it often means 1000’s of extra unique visitors every day depending on the popularity of the key term.
Below, is a nice video by Matt Cutts (head Google engineer) explaining the usage of the ATL Attribute in image tags to describe to Google what the image is about. There is of course more to ranking images then this simple video explains but this is something I will touch on again many time in the future.
