Increase your image rank on image search engines

With image optimal on your website, you can drive more traffic to your site from the image search engines like Google Image Search. Not like usual content search, image search engines uses some different ways (algorithms) to search for images on the internet. If your site has the high page rank, it doesn’t ensure that the images on your site will appear on the top of the image search result. You can check what I tell by doing a Google image search with the keyword “Google”.

Google Image Search (click to enlarge)
None of the top result images is from the Google website. Why can small/personal website compete with the big Guy Google? The answer is they use optimal images on their website and have some luck of the game. I say “luck” because we don’t know much about the real search algorithm which search engines like Google use. There are some ways to increase your image rank on image search engines below.

1. Use a meaningful name for an image file. For example, you have an image about Toyota car, you should name it as toyota-car.jpg, Toyota_Car.jpg. You shouldn’t name it as a number such as 001.jpg, image12.jpg,…

2. Use the alt and title properties in the IMG tag. This is an example,

3. Add some description lines for the image. Your readers love it too.

4. Place the image near the content about it or surround the image with text using the float property.

5. From my experience, it’s better to place the image at the top of the content than below it.