How to Dominate Google Image Search Results

Written by: Anyonita Green on 1/16/2104

Generally speaking, SEO tends to be very content oriented. When looking for ways to dominate search results, many bloggers focus on text and backlinks, but there's an often overlooked opportunity that makes a huge difference.

Dominating Google Image search results is an easy way to boost traffic to your blog or website. Taking advantage of this visual SEO tip is especially key for food bloggers since "we eat with our eyes"and many people judge a recipe by the photos accompanying it. 

Today, I'm going to share with you four free tips you could implement to dominate Google Image search results. These are proven, easy suggestions that require very little effort. You won't need any knowledge of coding and they'll work for any blog or any website. 

Take the guess work out of how to land in the first few results of Google Image! These tips will even work if your post isn't showing up on the first page of a standard Google search!  

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Food bloggers have a unique competition when it comes to SEO. There's a set number of ingredients we all work with and many blogs post the same recipes. In advertising, it's what you'd call a saturated market. So, to beat the crowd, food bloggers need a way to get noticed first.

That's where SEO comes in. Thanks to social media and sharing sites, utilizing text-based SEO and link building is easier than ever. But what can you do when you've built all the backlinks and you have the keywords in place and you're already sharing on social media? You tackle images. 

Check out these great pins for tips on food blogging, too:
I discovered these tips about a year ago. While doing my usual searching for my own recipes, I began to notice a trend: I was dominating (and still am) Google Image search results. I'm talking straight killing it, guys. Even on posts that I didn't rank on the first page of typical web searches on. I was right up there within the first three rows on Image search. Often times, my photos were in the first and second positions on the page.

This is important for me because in terms of sites that kick traffic to my blog, Google is number two. Outranked only by Pinterest. On a low day, Google alone sends around 600 visitors to my site and a good percentage of that footfall comes from Google Image search. I wanted to know why this was the case and whether I was doing something radically different from other bloggers. So I tested it. I repeatedly Googled (and had my husband Google periodically) my keywords and checked where I ranked in web and image searches. We also Googled the keywords from just about every blog I read to get a good understanding of what was going on and to compare and contrast.

Not all of my posts rank on the first page of Google web results. But about 75% of my posts do have images that rank on the first page and within the first three rows of Google image results. Let me show you what I mean:

Here are the Google web results from a search of "grilled chicken thighs & easy mushroom & white wine sauce":

And the image search for the same keywords yields:

What about a recipe that isn't on the first page? Well, I did a web search for "southern smothered pork chops" and couldn't find my recipe until about the third or fourth page. That's one of those really popular blogger dishes:

But wait, look at the Google image result for the same keyword:

So how did I do that? It all boiled down to these four main things:

1. Put keywords in your image file name.
   You need to be really careful with this, because Google does include checking file names in its algorithm and it can be a bit testy about what is considered spamming. Let's look at the pork chops example, some of my keywords for that recipe could have been easy recipes, homemade gravy, down home cooking etc. If I had titled my picture down-home-cooking-homemade-gravy-easy-recipes-southern-smothered-pork-chops.jpeg, Google would have most likely penalized me. That's not the type of keyword implementation I'm talking about. Keep it natural and keep it relevant.
2. Make use of alt text.
   Think of alt text like a caption under a photo in a newspaper. Newspapers don't publish photos without captions and neither should you. I've already discussed how to use alt text to your advantage on Pinterest. The same principle applies with Google and other search engines. Alt text is key.
3. Boost the text around your image.
   Again, keep it natural; keep it relevant. Sentences that suddenly get keyword heavy right around the photograph might look a bit suspicious. But, there's nothing wrong with strategically placing your image. Scroll back up to the first image in this post. Notice the line right before and right next to it.
   Avoid encyclopedia style image placement.You know how images are just dotted wherever there's space and next to the text that corresponds there's a reference like "see fig. 3". That's okay for a book, but not so good for a blog or website.
4. Put Pinterest to work for you--pin your own images and get those backlinks.
   Before G+ started to dominate, Pinterest took Google by storm. There was a time, about a year or two ago, when anything you Googled, came up with a Pinterest link in the first or second result. Things have eased off a bit thanks to algorithm changes by Google and the increasing popularity of G+, but one thing remains: Pinterest is like good SEO on crack. By simply pinning your images with good, intriguing descriptions that contain keywords, you're already winning the SEO battle.

Do you know of any other image-based SEO tips? I'd love to hear about them! Let me know in the comments.

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