Folks, I'm receiving traffic from people searching Google images. I'd like to try to optimize this but I can't figure out how Google is matching the keywords. Are they matching keywords to the image file names? Alt tags? Does anyone know? Thanks. John
all of the above, no one really knows. Just have to provide as much onscreen and meta data as possible.
Yes, the only thing I would add to that: Content is still king - I think the surrounding content, if any, does have some relevance to Google taking notice and picking up. Also, it's a good idea to also give images a relevant id and/or name - not talking about the file name, but an appropriate html attribute.
From what I've seen, matching is done by page popularity combined with image file names and surrounding text.
I think alt tags are the main thing. Others things like captions and surrounding text are the minor things that help as well.
Here is 19 ways to make that happen: http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-optimize-for-google-images-for-more-traffic/ Hope it helps Kind regards, Saiwan
google ranks first images of the first sites, which means if you rank well on google, your image will ranks well, you also can put descriptive alt tag