Should I expect increased traffic if I optimize my images?

Liam from Ireland asks:

"How does Image Search traffic compare to Web Search traffic? On a busy site with badly named images, should I expect an increase in traffic if I give all images descriptive names?"

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• image search

[ResumeRescue]

Thanks Matt, some sound advice.

[Techlinz]

Hey Matt (or other Google Superstar)...Will naming the images on a web page help the google bots determine what that page is about? or is this a waste of time?

[agapitoflores001]

As good as the usual.

[MyWebs]

From my experience the increase in image traffic is offset by users who steal your pictures. I am constantly fighting back against those who use my pictures on their web sites without asking permission. They even still have my visible watermark showing.

A highly ranked image within Google images is nice, but be prepared to spend some time fighting image thieves.

[jackprince1983]

I have to agree. It is indeed almost clear that if you search for "dog" via image search you will most likely find images named "dog.***" and pictures that are near content that targets a "dog" issue.

I think the more interesting part would be, can descriptive names for images near appropriate content increase my traffic? And how important are alt tags and title tags in this question.

[skynetF1]

Does the length of the image name matters? For example if you name your image "Should-I-expect-increased-tra­ffic-if-I-optimize-my-images.j­pg". Sometimes you want to be more specific, so you use a longer name, but does that matter to google or will it just ignore the (really) long image names?

[almightyvegeta87]

This was an obvious answer.

[sayweb]

very good as usual

[MichaelDadona]

I thanks both of you, Liam and Matt, making this thing very clear because sometime a photo tells thousand of words and pictorial explanation much better than texts. Another fact is a quality photo does edifies many viewers.

That is why I uploaded my photos/images to Picasa Web Album before upload it to my weblog site. Register - Caption, Multi-tagging, people (facial recognition), map, etc.

[garethjax]

...unless you wanna rank for the number of the beast on google images!