Our Basic Image SEO recommendations from the first article in this series, Six Steps to Quickly Optimize Images & Boost Your Traffic are pretty cut and dried. It's clear those signals do impact image search ranking. However, there is of course, more to this than just those basic factors. What we discuss in this article falls into the more advanced side and is completely based on our own experiments and observations and not something Google told us about. So, to be clear - these ideas are not guaranteed to have an impact like those discussed in our previous article, but if you're looking to go beyond the basics to really understand image optimization then you've come to right place (and you're in good company).

Understanding Google Image Search

To help understand how Google ranks images, you have to start by embracing the fact that Google does NOT care "who" owns the image, or "who" the first publisher was. Please let that sink in...

It's very clear that Google places ZERO weight on who the owner of an image is or who published it first. What they care about is WHERE the image is most popular.

Google ranks and serves up photos in image search based on three things:

1. The content on the page
2. The image itself
3. Page authority

Consider this real world example for more clarity on the above factors, as we seen it often...

You have a great image on your website, one that was taken on your camera and then uploaded to your site for your visitors. You take all the steps we've outlined in the previous article to help it rank well. You've chosen the correct keyword file name, used the alt attribute and it's embedded above the fold on a page that is hig...