Let’s take a little break from talking about the different wonderful Web apps that Google has made to make our lives easier. Google’s core business is all about search, after all, and for publishers (bloggers, webmasters, companies that run websites) this means being at the top of relevant searches is on top of the priority list.

We’ve written about search engine optimization (SEO) here one time or another, and I think it’s already a given that good use of markup standards (properly formed HTML, use of CSS) aids in optimizing for Google searches. However, the problem with optimizing for Google search is competition. There are just so many people who have websites about the same product, service or topic that your website or blog is about. Because of this, designer Chris Pearson thinks it would be worthwhile to optimize for Google image search as well. In fact, he says he got an upsurge in referrals from Google image search, particularly when he started optimizing how he inserted images on his site.

… over the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches! I don’t know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I’m always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do!

These numbers suggest that the image search market is far less competitive than keyword search, and I’m willing to bet that if you focus on image search optimization, you will reap some pretty huge benefits in the form of traffic and pageviews.

Of course, Chris notes–quite importantly–that if you’re following best practices by using correct markup, then you’re already optimized for image search.

Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the “best practices” heading for Webmasters of all shapes, sizes, and knowledge levels. Simply put, if you are truly running your site the right way, then image optimization is a de facto benefit.

So what does this mean, then? It entails keying in the image attributes along with the standard IMG tag. True enough, you can simply just use IMG SRC, to point to the URI of the graphic, but that’s simply not descriptive–Google cannot read images as a human would, after all. You need to provide descriptions that Google can crawl for and index. It’s best to use this format for incorporating images on your site.

<img src=”Image URI” width=(image width) height=(image height) alt=”Alternate text” title=”Text for mouse hover” />

• src - This is the standard image source attribute
• width - The width of the image, in pixels
• height - The height of the image, in pixels
• alt - The alternate text. This is displayed when the browser is unable to download the image, or if the browse has turned image displaying off
• title - This is the text that a user will see when he hovers his mouse cursor over an image

While the use of the ALT tag is obviously helpful in optimizing for Google search, the dimensions (width and height) are also important, because Google image search also lets users search for images according to size in the advanced options. This means defining your image size makes it easier for Google to crawl and index your site, and subsequently store information about your graphics.