Keyword Targeting Your Images For Fun and Profit

I’ve been getting a great deal of traffic lately on one of my sites from Google Images.

It actually took me a while to figure out where the traffic was coming from.  My stats tools don’t differentiate between where the search traffic is coming from when it comes from Google, just that it came from Google and the keyword that was used.

Well, I was getting 50-100 hits a day on a couple of keywords that I didn’t rank higher than 30th on the regular search rankings Google, but yet the traffic was there.  Where were they coming from?  Google Images!

If I went to Google Images for those keywords, there were images off my site appearing in the first couple of images on the list.  Somehow, with little to no effort I had managed to hit top spots for these images.

Image targeting is really easy.  When placing an image on your site, do the following:

Image Keyword Targeting and Tagging 101

If you look at Amazon.com, all their image names stink for SEO.  They all have great names for databases, nice and unique.  They all look something like this: “41SLuGhteWL._SL500_AA300_.jpg”.  But as far a search engine is concerned, that stinks.  I liberally reuse images from Amazon, as they provide a tool to generate affiliate links with images and instruct you to save the image on your server.  I save them locally, but I then change the name of the image to match what it is, then I upload it into a post using my regular WordPress tools.  So for the image below I would change the name from that gibberish above to “hoover-platinum-upright-vacuum.jpg” when I put it on my site.  Like this:

See?   I added a readable name to the image.  Hover your mouse over it and notice the alt text to the image also is keyword targeted.  You’ll note that I put a link to Amazon for that product for when you click on it.  Go ahead, click on it and see.  Google sees that as another vote that that image is valid since it links to a page that matches the keywords.  The fact that one of my Amazon affiliate tags is also in that link doesn’t hurt either.

Will it get indexed?  Hard to say.  Like anything else, Google looks at the context it’s in.  Since this site doesn’t have a ton of images and isn’t about vacuum cleaners at all, there is a good chance it will never be found.  I do sometimes rank for random plumbing keywords due to the site name.  Maybe if I used a plumbing image instead?

Check back in a month and see if we’re ranking for either of these images.

Does Google Image Traffic Convert?

Good question.  I seriously doubt if it converts as well as regular search traffic, but I’m guessing that most product searches for images would show at least some conversions.  It passes the personal sniff test.  If I’m looking for a Culligan Water Filter image to see if I had the right replacement, I might click through to the site I found it on if that site looked well designed and had a good headlines to draw me in.

If I can come up with a good test to see if I can isolate Google Image traffic I’ll run some tests and post the results!