I stumbled upon this a few years ago after buying a couple of established tattoo design web sites with many images. After having the sites for a while I checked the traffic stats and noticed traffic Google images. Not just a little traffic either. I would say over 50 percent of the traffic from Google was from their image search.

At that time, I was not even aware that Google had image search. I never used it before so it went unnoticed. So, after seeing the traffic stats of my tattoo design sites, I went to the image search and searched looking for my web sites in the results. After a few different try's I found my site ranked very highly for some keywords. That is the important part to remember about image seo, you have to tag the images with keywords just as you do for other content like say blog posts.

I use word press blogs for many of my sites and wordpress makes it super easy to tag your images. Before you ad an image there is something else you need to do. Use the adwords keyword tool or some other keyword tool and do some research to see which terms get searched and which ones you want to target. This is the same as doing any other keyword research except you have to keep in mind that it is images that are going to be searched. Now, not every niche can use images effectively. For example, the SEO niche is one where I can not think of an image that is related to it.

However, some niches are perfect for getting traffic from image search. In fact I would say the large majority of niches can use images very effectively. Make sure you use images that you have the right to use. One place to find good images is a site like istockphoto where you can pay as little as one dollar for quality photos. Another place to get images is flickr where you can get good photos for free.

You must make sure these photos can be used first though. Check what they call the creative commons license for each photo. Many of the photographers will just ask for you to attribute the image to them. The best way to get an image is to create it yourself. One of the easiest is to use a digital camera and take your own photos. This way, nobody else will have the image and it will be even more likely to get picked up by the image search and rank high. So, now start using images when you add content to your web sites. Do the important keyword research and add tags to the images. Then check the traffic stats and see what happens. I think you will be happy with the results.