Chris Silver Smith at WordCamp Dallas 2009

Chris Silver Smith from Search Engine Land gave a very informative talk on using social images sharing sites to get more traffic to your blog using SEO techniques. He gave some valuable insight to using Google Image Search and popular image sharing sites to grab more traffic for your blog.

Here is a handy formula for considering how to get good traction for your images in Google Image Search:

Google Image Search + Universal Search = Image SEO

Keys to ranking in Google Image Search

Image filename
Title of Page with Image
Keyword found in text on the page and near the image
alt text of image
anchor text of links pointing to page or image
Image EXIF data – geotaging information defines data about an image
Freshness of image
Type of Image
<H1> tag content on the page
Number of pages and pagerank of pages linking to image page
Good caption text near image
Use keywords in image names
Make photos publicly viewable

Popular Photo Sharing Sites

Flickr
Photobucket
PBase
Webshots
23
Fotki
MySpace

Photo Tips

Take good quality pictures
High contrast pictures do better at smaller sizes
Add a unique photo
Create comparative photo mashups
License your photos so other people can use
Require news sources to link to you if they want to use your photos
Optimize your images in Flickr using geotag location information
Create thematic set of photos to create related groups of photos to build value for people are interested in that topic
Post Fickr pics directly into your blog articles and tweak the local style to match your blog
Post as many pictures as possible to Flickr to increase your surface area and draw more traffic
Bookmark your Flickr images on Delicious. Yahoo owns both Flickr and Delicious and they use these services to understand how content should be indexed in their search listing.