How to optimise for Google Image?

Doing really well in SER, but not images

[whats up skip]

I really don't understand how Google determines the importance of imaged in the Google Image section.

For the standard web search for a key phrase we appear at position 1 or 2 in the SER, but for Google Image we are on the second page near the bottom.

What is worse is the image that shows has nothing to do with the key phrase and was near the bottom of the page. This unrelated image had no hyperlinks through or alt tags for the keyphrase. While the images higher on the page with hyperlinks through and alt tags were not shown.

On top of this I modified the page about four months ago to lower the importance further of this unrelated image, but nothing changed. Then around two months ago I removed the image from the page completely, but it still shows up in the Google image search results.

It would appear that Google does not update the data for Google Images very often, but what else can I do to improve my performance?

[Quadrille]

I'm no expert in this at all, but my best-showing images seem to be where three points coincide:

1. alt text
2. image file name
3. caption or nearby text

But it really could be luck - I've seen several discussions on this, and most conclude in Star trek style, that "it's logic, Jim, but not as we know it".

Don't expect any serious links to text serps; different ball game entirely.

[Shoestring]

We skipped alt descriptions for the time being with our recent site revision and it seems that, if anything, it has HELPED us in the serps.

Going to test a page or two by adding them back, but Google image has never appeared to do anything for us except attract hacks who steal our custom pics.

[Halfdeck]

Possible ranking factors

- Around 7-12 words of visible text above and below an IMG (not sure if stop words are ignored or whether Google counts no. of chars vs words) I do know there is some kind of radius where if text lies outside it, it won't effect your ranking
- ALT Tag
- H tag
- TITLE
- keywords in image url, including keywords in directories and in image filename, but must be separated by -,+ etc, not _ and avoid capitalization
- PageRank
- Image size/resolution - bigger the better.

No effect (as far as I've seen)

- Keywords in url of the page an image is on.
- anchor text of links pointing to a page
- META Description
- META keywords

P.S.

- META keywords and on-page text near an IMG element.

If you have adult keywords in meta keywords or near an image, then your images will probably not show up in safe search.

[photopassjapan]

M-hm...

Yea well, all this and AGE.
And age being the most important factor.
Furthermore modifications to your image attributes and surroundings are likely to be affected by this lag all the same.

It takes G up to half a year to get back to a site and index its images, even if that site is often crawled, and has a good PR and good SERP positions. Unless of course it's a favourite.

I know this because on another site we can more or less predict when the images will start to appear in image search by now. With literally everything you can expect to be in place being in place, good SERP ranks for all the relevant keywords, it takes about three to six months for the indexed pages' images to be displayed.

For that's a different bot and a different index. And is being updated less rapidly. Both infrastructure-wise and regarding fresh data.

At least these are the kind of answer we've got from G when asking what's up with image search.

[whats up skip]

Thanks for the feedback.

The six months lag is a bit sad, but it does explain somethings.

It looks like we were doing most things correctly, just that Google grabbed the unrelated image.