How to get your pictures indexed and ranked on Google Images

Google uses two different bots, one is to index webpages and the other one is googlebot-image. The google bot visits very often, but the google image bot will visit alot less often, every 6 months is what I have been told.  If you want to block google from indexing your pictures, use the robots.txt to block the googlebot image user agent.

Google images can provide alot of traffic, especially if your photo is put at the top of text search results. The more photos you have the more traffic you will get.

Make sure your website has unique, good quality photos that are relevant to your website.

Once you have added pictures to all your pages, try and make up a seperate gallery. 

Later on you can Look in your google analytics to see how much traffic you are getting from google images and which photos are getting the most attention, find the photo and add some adsense next to it.

Now you have put your photos on your website, you can follow the next steps to get the pictures indexed and ranked on google images.

• Use image ALT tag to determine content
• Use image Filename to determine content
• Add comments/captions section
• Use surrounding text to determine content
• Use overall page theme to determine content

Alt Tags and filenames

Web 2.0

Another great way of letting google know what your picture is about, is by letting people make comments on it.

Xsitepro users

To add a gallery.  Open a new page > right click > widget wizard > image > image gallery

To add/change ALT tags,  right click on the selected image (that is already posted) click on image properties and change.

Useful Resoures- Essential Reading

http://www.ragepank.com/articles/38/optimise-for-google-image-search/

http://www.johnmurch.com/2008/05/21/10-simple-ways-to-improve-ranking-on-google-image-search/