Google Images is the largest picture search engine on the internet. If you have any types of images on your website (which you probably do), you should take advantage of this. It can be a good source of traffic for any website.

A recent study was done to determine how Google ranks images in their Google Image search. The study shows that the words around the image (before and after) hold the most weight. Images in the results page are tagged mostly by the 25-50 words before and after the picture. The 25-50 words that appear in front of the image tend to hold slightly more weight than the 25-50 words behind the image.

Another thing found was that the proximity of the keyword to the image is very important. An image looking like “bla blablabla blabla bla ferrari bla <img> blablablablablablabla” will rank higher than an image that looks like “blabla ferrari blablablabla bla bla <img> blabla bla blablabla.”

One more interesting thing to note is that the “ALT” tag, which was previously thought of as being very important in a Google Image search, doesn’t really hold much weight. It is much more important to optimize the text before and after your image.

Good luck with your Google Image optimizing! Let me know in the comments what your results look like!