The other day I made a post on Google ranking factors so that you have a better idea about what factors influence Google’s ranking algorithm and the estimated weight which is placed on each one.

Google Image Ranking

Google has its own SERPs for images for any keyword, as well. If you click on the image tab in Google, you can search for any keyword to get images related to that search phrase. Clicking on the image takes you to the web page on which that image is shown, so this is another great way to increase website traffic.

Therefore, I’ve put together this list of 6 Google image ranking factors which have been proven and vouched for by Google themselves in most cases.

Google Image Ranking Factors

1. Effective keyword use in your image’s file name as well as in its “alt text” tag (see Alt Text vs. Title) can do a lot for telling Google exactly what your file is about. This is the most important thing which you can do, and it’s very simple to rename your file if appropriate before uploading it to your site and it’s simple to use your keyword in the alt text tag using WordPress, as well.
2. The keywords around your image are next in terms of importance. You should be using your image’s keyword as well as LSI keywords around your main keyword to help Google identify what keyword should be associated with and trigger that image.
3. The more people linking to your image on your site, i.e. you have several webmasters linking to your image at example.com/image.jpg (as opposed to their stealing your image and pasting it on their own site), the better it will rank. This one is basic link building SEO.
4. Just like the biggest ranking factor for a web page ranking for a keyword, the trust/authority of a domain which an image is hosted on is a very important.
5. The better which that web page ranks for its keyword, the better that the image on that page will rank for its keyword.
6. This last factor is speculative, but the larger the image, the better it will rank. Why? Because larger images have more pixels and will be of a higher quality than smaller ones which will appear more grainy. This works in the “providing the best user experience” as opposed to being a hard and fast SEO based rule as higher quality images are downloaded/shared more often and are preferred by people, so Google wants to serve only the highest quality/size images first and foremost in response to a search query.