Our Basic Image SEO recommendations from the first article in this series, Seven Steps to Quickly Optimize Images & Boost Your Traffic are pretty cut and dried.

It's clear those signals do impact image search rankings. However, there is more to this than just those basic factors. What we discuss in this article falls into the more advanced side of image optimization and is completely based on our own experiments and observations - NOT something Google has announced.

So, to be clear - these ideas are not guaranteed to have an impact like those discussed in our previous article. However, if you're looking to go beyond the basics and 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 an image. Please let that sink in...

Google places ZERO weight on who owns an image 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, including text it can read
3. Page authority

Real World Example

To give you a little more clarity on the above factors, let's consider this real world example, one that we ...