Search Engine Optimization for Google Image Search

Most SEO s are conversant with the basic guidelines about optimizing a web page and this information can also be found on various websites. While web page optimization process has got atleast a few standard methodologies, optimizing images for Google image search or other image search engine is still a puzzle for most of us.



One of the main reason for this might be the notion that image search doesn't necessarily drive traffic or rather useful traffic ( traffic that would convert ). While working on one of my client's website we found one of our website images was coming up in google image search and on analysing the server logs we found that we were getting considerable traffic from that result and some of which also converted to leads and sales. When we had this information, after a brief discussion with the client we decided to do an experiment with optimizing image for Google image search. I made a post related to this today in another forum and thought , it might be a good read.. so am putting the methodology here too..

We were trying to get an image of a "fruit" to show up in Google image search when searched by the fruit name.

Things that I did are :

1. Created a very light image for the fruit( around 5k)
2. Named the image fruitname.jpg
3. Added alt attribute ( fruit name)
4. Activated "Enhanced Image Search" for the website from Google Webmaster Central
   After around 5 days
5. Used the image to link to a page ( http://www.domain.com/fruitname.html )
6. Added a Title to the link ( fruitname page)
   
   After another 5 days
7. Added a direct link to the image ( http://www.domain.com/images/fruitname.jpg ) in one of the most frequently crawled pages of the site with the anchor text : fruitname

What I did not Do but should have done...

1. Adding a long description for the image using the "longdesc" attribute.

I cannot assure the effectiveness of this process because to my assumption we actually could not continue the experiment for the minimum period that it deserved as the client decided to change the entire design of the website. However, I think if all these steps are implemented there might be a fair chance of getting the images to show up in image search results for various search engines.
If anyone of you come across any other valuable information on how to SEO for Google image search or other image search engines please feel free to put in your comments.