SEOTechniques for getting more traffic from "google image search"

What is a google image bot ?

As you know google manages the indexing of content on web using several bots :

1.deepbots
2.freshbots
3.imagebots
4.mediabots [for managing ads on your site/blog],
and
5.adbots [ newest ; for adwords ] .

But let us not get in to this .what we want is the technique to get our site's images indexed on google image search .

How much traffic can you get from image search :

Hope you all know the web analytics site - histats.com .
Iam using this currently to analyse my blog traffic [ on both my celebrity and this blog ].For the past 6 months i have gone a long way in increasing the traffic ; and histats shows my stats like this :

search engine :175
website:81
no referrer : 409 [ SEE BELOW ]




I initially thought that the "no referrers" were those who had visited my site already, liked it and visiting it repeatedly ; but i was wrong ; When i used another tool " hittail.com " , i understood that i am getting about 1200 visitors in 3 days , from google image search . Now i understood the real meaning of "NO REFERRERS" and the importance of google image search .Actually "hittail.com" shows the keywords that your visitors had searched for and a real-time traffic analysis of your visitors .what histats referred to as " no referrers " were actually "google image search visitors + a little bit of my blog fans " .

What are the Techniques for indexing images in google ? :





Open the above picture in a new tab :

1.USE APPROPRIATE FILENAMES FOR YOUR PICS :

i have uploaded a pic of angelina jolie to my celebrity blog and you could see that i have used appropriate file names ; if i hadnt changed it , my filename would have been "fcke3hqvegpv6p5qozz5" ! And the google bot would have thought it to be non-sense .
Remember they are bots and not humans ! see everything in their perspective .

2.USE "ALT" TAGS :

This is another important technique for image indexing ; you may see that in the above picture i have used the alt tags ;

3.ENABLE "ENHANCED IMAGE SEARCH" IN WEBMASTER CENTRAL :

Hope everyone would have been familiar with the webmaster tools ; in the tools you would see that there is diagnostic tab; click it and select "Enhanced image search" and click on the checkbox" and click ok .

By this way your images will available for those using the "google image labeler" , where googlers label the images and inturn help in their indexing !

4.Use relevant text around your images.

It is recommended that descriptive text with your targeted keywords be placed immediately before or after the image itself. If you do a search for any term on Google Image, you’ll find that a short description of 20+ characters beneath every image. You’ll probably notice that the keyword is listed in bold as well.

7. Use Internal and Social Site Tags for your Images

If you are using images with little or no textual content, it might be helpful to tag your images using internal tagging functions or social tags like Technorati. This may add more weight to your image and help it to rank better. If you are uploading your images using Flickr, remember to use the appropriate keyword tags as well.

Important info :

Also understand that normal google bots [ used for ranking your webpages] are different from your google image bots .Because image bots do not search for backlinks for indexing your images ; they search for the information that tell them what a particular image is all about .

and secondly , google image indexing are done rarely [ almost twice a year ] .while the page ranks are updated every 3-4 months !

if you have any other techniques , post them here as comments .