Optimizing Your Images for Organic Search: Part 2

Christian Vuong | August 26th, 2010

Just last month, I wrote a blog post about how to optimize images for Google’s revamped image search. Now 30 days later, the update.
How does our image result stack up to a Winery that has been online since 2002?

Search Query	monte de oro	monte de oro winery
Google	1	1
Yahoo!	8	2
Bing	10	2

The Google Image Search Results for "monte de oro"

The Yahoo! Image Search Results for "monte de oro"

The Bing Image Search Results for "monte de oro"

As you can see from the screenshots above, the optimized image now appears above the fold on all 3 major search engines. From just correctly naming and tagging the images, we’ve captured a spot for a name brand.

Key Takeaways:

Don’t be afraid if competitors have age on you! In this specific case while the term may not have been ultra-competitive, we still went against very established web sites in the wine, travel, and city-specific niches including the winery itself and TripAdvisor.com.
Start in baby steps. SEO is a long-term strategy. Don’t wait to group hundreds of images together or for the next major upgrade to your CMS. Start by optimizing 1 image a week, move to 2 a week, and then 1 daily. At minimum upload all new images with the correct file naming (refer to previous post for recommendations).
Consider the content around your image. If our entire blog post was about an experience at the winery, a review, or their varietals, it would add even more value and relevancy to this search term.
And lastly, monitor analytics. Benchmark your progress and see what organic traffic that image or blog post is driving in. For us, we decided to monitor the entrance keywords to this specific blog post. This way we can better gauge what type of content our visitors are searching for and better tailor future content for them. Google Analytics makes it very simple to drill down to this level. After logging into Google Analytics, you’ll want to click on “Top Content,” locate your blog post or image from the list of URLs, and then click “Entrance Keywords.”

Below is a sample of the entrance keywords that drove traffic to our blog.

Now, back to optimizing today’s image