Data from Hitwise for February of 2009 shows that the top three search properties owned by Google are:
| Search Property | $ of All Google Traffic |
|---|---|
| 68.42% | |
| YouTube | 9.41% |
| Google Image Search | 5.76% |
This means that Google Image Search has about 8% of the traffic of Google Web Search. For people with image rich sites this means there is a substantial opportunity. Bear in mind that the number of people competing for that image search volume is much less. The size and scope of this opportunity is what makes my recent interview with Google’s Peter Linsley so interesting.
We dig past the usual basic image optimization techniques (image file names, alt attributes, etc.) and talk about the other things you can do to help yourself get optimized for Image Search.
Thanks for the great post. I’ve always wondered about image search. It appears that many of my images do not appear. This post has helped me to determine a better set up for my images (alt tags, size, etc.) that will hopefully get them indexed.
I know that with universal search that the opportunity surrounding image search, video, etc. continues to grow. It may only garner 8 percent of the overall traffic now but I think it will continue to expand in importance.
Thank you very much. I am wonderring if I can share your article
in the bookmarks of society,Then more friends can talk about
this problem.
Yup, I’ve gotten quite a bit of traffic from image searches.
I’m of the opinion the only reason people search for images is to rip them off. I have seen my images all over the web and they are images that I paid a great deal of money to acquire. Now I use my robots.txt file to prevent crawling of my images folders.
Thank you so much for this post.It opens my eyes and will help me to rethink the design of my site.
I was a little bit wrong with a pictures.