Improving to Google Images Traffic

[uggur]

Hi,

I've question about Google images. We've an ecommerce site and when i analyse to traffic sources, images searches are so so less. Our product images are in different domain and we're using cdn service. For example, our site is a.com and product images under to a.net .

So should we serve the images under a.com ? How can i improve to images search traffic? I need to advices about how can i improve to images search traffic.

Note: Images already optimized with alt tag, file name (product-title.jpg), images alt and file names are relates to product pages and metatags etc..

Thank you

[deadsea]

In my experience, it is relatively easy to optimize for image traffic, but it may not be worth it. Traffic is *much* less qualified from image search than from normal Google search. We can make 20 times more money from the average search visitor compared to the image search visitor. This is probably because many people just want to see the picture and then leave. Also, the landing experience from image search often doesn't show your full site, but a lightbox with the image over your site. Even when users do get to your site, they may not get to the most relevant page.

Here are my tips for optimizing for image search:

• Host your own images. We used images.example.com for the images on a CDN and www.example.com for the main site.
  
• Google takes keywords for the images from alt tags and text that surrounds the image. Put the caption both in the alt text and next to the image in a div that contains only the caption and the image.
  
• Google states that they factor "image quality" into the algorithm. As far as I can tell, they really mean "bigger is better". Prefer larger image sizes. I'd use at least 800px in the largest direction. 1000px would be even better.
  
• If larger images in a page take up too much space, put a thumbnail in the page and link that thumbnail to the larger image using a normal <a> href to the .jpg itself. It doesn't seem to matter to the algo if the image is displayed in the page, or linked from the page. Here is the example: <a href="full_size.jpg"><img src="thumb_nail.jpg"></a> (the thumbnail can be in robots.txt). This may preclude using fancier image viewers. If you do use some fancy javascript to browse your images, make sure the "view source" of your page looks like the above example with maybe an onclick that intercepts the href and opens the fancy image viewer.