Is Image SEO Good For Traffic? How to use it on Squidoo Lenses

A lot of you probably know that you should SEO the hell out of your images, but you may not bother to do it much! I'm here to share a few facts that just might motivate you...

My top Squidoo lenses are (with a couple of exceptions) surviving on image traffic. By which I mean they're in the very top results and pulling in more image searches than normal ones. Most people looking for pictures then click out to the original. Clickout ready visitors = <3 style="font-weight: bold;">Examples:
The Disney Femslash lens... is starting to pull in 'normal' disney related searches, and if you search for Disney Femslash, 'my' images dominate the first couple of PAGES. (17/21 on the first page; 16/21 on the second and so on for a fair bit :D )
In the past week, my visits were:
Referral 926
Direct 170
Google 22
Yahoo 2
Bing 2
AOL 1

Of the referrals, 700 were image searches. (incidentally? this lens is insane. The visits have just been going up, I had over 200 unique visitors yesterday. And yes, they were mostly image searches)

For my Chell (from Portal) lens:
Referral 146
Direct 16
Google 3

100 from image searches.

Mermaid posters lens
Referral 81
Google 26
Direct 11
Ask 1
Yahoo 1

About 70 from image searches

Even my little Invisible Cupcakes lens is pulling in a few (though I wonder what they're looking at!)
Source Visits
Referral 43
Google 7
Direct 4
Bing 1

(about half the referrals are image searches)
*heh, this lens is on the second page of Google for "cupcake decoration"

What I Do

1. Rename the file I'm uploading/adding where that is an option to a bunch of (relevant) descriptive keywords
- separate the name with hyphens like this : red-artrage-lady-digital-painting (completely conjecture on my part; it just makes sense that as that is the best format for URLs because of how Google will see them, it should be for images as well)
- try and get very specific with the description (extra keywords = good, keyword stuffing = bad)

2. Always, always ALWAYS add an alt="words here" into the code (or use the title field of Squidoo images when uploading). You can do this with any image you're adding yourself - affiliate poster codes from Zazzle, your own art...

3. Sometimes, if it's not too repetitive or I can be bothered - or it's not obvious what people will be clicking on - I add a title="description" as well. I'm a bit lazy there though...

If you want to know the HTML:

<a href="http://www.blogger.com/LINK%20HERE"><img src="http://www.blogger.com/Image%20link/location%20here" alt="awesome picture of me" title="sneaky caption shows up when people hover over it" /></a>

*note; Google also looks at words written next to the picture/on the same page, so the words attached to the picture aren't everything. But they seem to be a lot.


The search referrals from images are a pain, but you CAN break them down. Right+click and copy them into notepad.

This search result, for example, landed on the second page for the search term "the last unicorn almathea" and clicked on this image (it was next to the word 'Almathea')

I'm actually doing the artists a bigger favour than I ever expected to, as they're getting found! (Of course, without them, I wouldn't have much of a page, so it's a mutual favour) ...that sounded rather egotistical. Heh.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/234/9/8/The_healing_of_Helga_by_nana_51.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.squidoo.com/disney-femslash/101044531-MultiPairing-Femslash-Vids&usg=__Ov9TgiMkCPNaDY9Vh1TeRaZBYR8=&h=566&w=800&sz=88&hl=en&start=345&zoom=1&tbnid=cxGb-Kk9IB9gyM:&tbnh=114&tbnw=160&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthe%2Blast%2Bunicorn%2Bamalthea%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DX%26biw%3D1406%26bih%3D770%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C8189&um=1&itbs=1&ei=MY-ETOz8JJHCsAPmtuQF&iact=rc&dur=442&oei=0YqETIuKEYyisQOknPX2Bw&esq=14&page=13&ndsp=32&ved=1t:429,r:28,s:345&tx=88&ty=57&biw=1406&bih=770


Useful image-related Squidoo pages:

http://www.squidoo.com/free-squidoo-images-and-graphics
http://www.squidoo.com/free-web-graphics
http://www.squidoo.com/hotlinking
http://www.squidoo.com/upload-images