I’ve been thinking a lot about image search for blogs since attending a panel about image search at SMX.

Did you know that according to Comscore >7% of all searches take place in image search engines? Also eyes tend to focus on top left centered search results, but this changes for web pages with images (Enquiro’s eye tracking study). Here are some best practices that I learned at SMX and elsewhere and have been using for great results:

• Make the images relevant to the user. Think about user intent when choosing images for your blog post
• Keep images fresh and clear. This is both for the search engines as well as user liking
• Put images above the fold, this helps Google search results for images as well as other Google properties

•    Add lots of text around the image, in the image title, and image tags (for photosharing services like Flickr). This helps Google figure out if the image is relevant for its image search results. Special note on Photosharing to help image search

Use as many photosharing services as possible, but if you are strapped for time use Flickr. Flickr has title and tagging features that make it excellent from an SEO standpoint. Also referral traffic within Flickr and from images in image search engines is high.

Other photosharing options are Twitpic, Picasa, Slideshare, Slide, Tinypic, Smugmug, Fotki, Photobucket, Imageshack, Dropshots, Webshots, PBase, 23, Myspace, and Facebook.Keep in mind that  Myspace and Facebook have indexation rules that prevent ease indexing of images with search engines.

For more image search tips check out this great post by Michael Pekker.

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