Today, instead of explaining why image optimization is important for blogs I will simply demonstrate it.

These are the top 12 search referers this month on SEO 2.0:

Search Term Source (Google)
alone image search
fake image search
fakes image search
best rss reader search
seo blog search
chewbacca image search
seo 2.0 search
silly image search
fun image search
wordpress image search
who to follow on twitter search
fake breasts image search

SEO 2.0 has much more direct, social media traffic and other referers than search traffic so it might be a bad comparison. Nonetheless the word “alone” brings 10 times more traffic than the term “SEO blog” I’m globally in the top 10 on Google.com (at 7 recently viewed with an US proxy).

So do I need to tell you why image optimization is important for blogs?

  • art
  • photography
  • design
  • gadget
  • ecommerce

oriented blogs can get big amounts of image search traffic.

Image search as part of Universal Search is a must optimize for in SEO 2.0

Some bizarre aspects of it:

  • I’m at number 1 in Google.com for “Wordpress” in image search.
  • I’m not even on the first page results at 10 in the US for “alone” in image search so there must be a whole damn lot lonely people out there.

Next week I will tell you how to optimize for Google image search. It’s different than most people tell you. Forget all the alt-attributes etc.

Related posts:

  1. 7 Simple Image SEO Best Practices that Lead to the Top of Google Image Search
  2. The Most Important Difference Between Websites and Blogs
  3. Top 10 Firefox Extensions for Search, Website Optimization and SEO I Use
  4. The 7 SEO Blogs with the Funniest Names
  5. 7 Optimization Techniques I Learned from Playing With my 7 Year Old Daughter

February, 2009 | You can follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback.

This thing has 21 Comments

  1. rp__ (2 comments.)
    Posted February 27, 2009 at 10:20 pm | Permalink

    Most visitors who are looking for pictures appear out of the sudden, suck blood, and go. I guess these people don’t know much about blogs, and most of them don’t even get the idea that the Flickr link beneath a pic leads to a site where they can the picture in a higher resolution. At least that’s my experience (with a blog for a German-speaking audience).

  2. Timps (1 comments.)
    Posted February 28, 2009 at 1:41 am | Permalink

    I know exactly the feeling, I got hundreds of hits a month last year on a single image in a tutorial. Amazing the things google decides are the important ones!

  3. onreact (591 comments.)
    Posted February 28, 2009 at 11:29 am | Permalink

    Exactly guys. So once these people appear, what to do with them? This is a question I want to answer.

  4. feedbb (2 comments.)
    Posted March 2, 2009 at 7:47 am | Permalink

    my blog’s visits from image search were very little,so very looking forward to seeing your next post.

  5. Federico Munoa
    Posted March 2, 2009 at 10:37 pm | Permalink

    Actually I was checking the exact thing on my site today. I think is not important only for blogs but actually for every single site on the internet. Great post as usual. What surprised me the most is that you have actual single words keywords coming to your site.

  6. marketingmat (4 comments.)
    Posted March 3, 2009 at 11:16 am | Permalink

    I think further appealing images are something that could well be incorporated into our sites.

  7. onreact (591 comments.)
    Posted March 4, 2009 at 1:06 pm | Permalink

    Federico: Yeah, images are important everywhere but blogs are in a better position it seems.

    mat: I think so too :-)

  8. Nick Rinylo (5 comments.)
    Posted March 11, 2009 at 11:11 am | Permalink

    What do you mean forget about ‘alt’ tags can you please divulge some more information about this?

  9. onreact (1 comments.)
    Posted March 12, 2009 at 1:36 am | Permalink

    I mean that alt-attributes for images are like meta keyword-tags. Everybody abused them. Now they get discounted. I never use them, at least not for SEO and rank like hell in image search despite or due to the lack of them.

  10. Stanley (2 comments.)
    Posted March 12, 2009 at 8:17 pm | Permalink

    Is it the image filename then?

  11. onreact (591 comments.)
    Posted March 12, 2009 at 8:40 pm | Permalink

    Yes. But that’s not the sole factor.

  12. Evan (1 comments.)
    Posted March 17, 2009 at 10:46 pm | Permalink

    Its amazing how many people come to a site for an image and never stick around, i blame google for making it too easy…

  13. Adam (1 comments.)
    Posted March 30, 2009 at 7:23 pm | Permalink

    I am super interested in finding out how to rank my images in google images. Since the keyword I am working on always displays an images result on the first page above any other site it will defiantly generate great leads for the business. Please let me know when the next post comes out…. I am dying to know!!!!!

  14. John House (1 comments.)
    Posted March 31, 2009 at 4:02 am | Permalink

    The power of SEO for image search is often underrealized. It can bring in quite a substantial ammount of traffic. Im looking forward to what you have to say on the topic.

  15. PiterKokoniz (1 comments.)
    Posted April 8, 2009 at 12:58 am | Permalink

    Hello ! ;)
    My name is Piter Kokoniz. Just want to tell, that I like your blog very much!
    And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
    Sorry for my bad english:)
    Thank you:)
    Piter.

  16. Fenix (1 comments.)
    Posted April 8, 2009 at 7:27 am | Permalink

    Wow, optimizing images… taking blogs to a whole other level!

  17. Paul (1 comments.)
    Posted April 12, 2009 at 7:02 pm | Permalink

    Great article underlining the importance of optimising images, BUT I’ve found that whilst links from images increase the overall visibility of your site, the sort of traffic they generate is not always useful. I’ve found that surfers searching for a particular image aren’t often buyers.

  18. Michael Longo (3 comments.)
    Posted August 12, 2009 at 7:18 pm | Permalink

    A significant amount of traffic is generated by images. There importance cannot be overrated.

  19. Tim Gregory (4 comments.)
    Posted October 21, 2009 at 8:12 am | Permalink

    Tad, this post really made me laugh – how did you get links from someone looking for images of “chewbacca” and “fake breasts”???

    BTW, I see the first image you are ranked for is named “white-hat-seo.jpg” – is that intentional, or a mistake?

  20. Jonny (2 comments.)
    Posted December 29, 2009 at 5:32 pm | Permalink

    I know a friend get lots of traffic from image search by “tattoo” related keyword.

  21. Posted February 24, 2010 at 12:04 am | Permalink

    @Paul, I would agree that optimising images for blogs are not that important but optimising the image itself is important when it comes to increasing the speed at which your blog loads which I think could potentially rank you higher in search results

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