Duct Tape Marketing

Image search is the fastest growing search on the web. And, since Google, Ask and Yahoo are now including images in their search results pages, web marketers have been presented with a whole new opportunity. So it only makes sense that website owners follow a few extra steps to ensure their images are optimized for search:
 

1. Use Alt Tags Properly 
   Your alt tag should describe your image and include your keywords whenever possible. Not only this is useful for search engine optimization, but it's also crucial for web accessibility.
    
2. Use Keywords In Your Image Names
   Attention all do-it-yourself webmasters out there… your digital camera's default filenames do nothing for search engine optimization. Update your image names to include your keywords. An image named "green_polo_shirt.jpg" will be much more effective than "dcs001597.jpg".
    
3. Optimize the Text Surrounding Your Images 
   The text adjacent to your images should contain your keywords or keyword phrases. This technique is relatively easy to achieve simply by including a caption with all of your images. 
    
4. Check Your Robots.txt File
   Before the existence of image search, most webmasters disallowed crawling of the image folder. For some of us, this has become the default structure of our robots.txt files. If you have images that you definitely do not want in the SERPs, consider creating two different folders for your graphics - one that is crawlable and one that isn't.
    
5. Create a Sitemap for Your Graphics
   A separate sitemap allows you to point to your images with proper link text and ensure that the spiders index all the images you would like to have indexed.
    
6. Take Advantage of Social Networking
   Submit your images to Flick'r, YouTube, and other photo sharing sites. Be sure to take full advantage of optimization features such as tagging.
    
7. Don't Forget the Meta Data
   Photo gallery pages are often generated from programs or scripts that ignore meta data. You can give your photos a boost in the search engines by manually adding keyword and description tags to your gallery pages.
      

Keep in mind that images found in the search engines are often used out of context. If copyright issues are important to you, you might wish to watermark your images, or keep certain ones in a disallowed folder.