Best way to get improve SEO ranking for image-based site

Question

How do I best approach common SEO techniques for a website with images as the main content?

The problem here is the content is all image based, so other than Friendly URLS, H1/H2 tags, Sitemap, RSS Feed, Alt Img, what else can be done to gain search rankings?

I realise most search engines (if not all) are text based and text is how they better understand the business and "usefulness" of a site and therefore compare it with other sites, but other than social media and driving constant traffic what is the best thing to do or focus on?

Answer 1

I would focus on:

1. Naming the images with real world phrases: beautiful-girl-with-roses.jpg
2. Adding complementary descriptions in the alt tag: alt="Beautiful red hair girl"
3. Good titles in your title tag: "Image of a red haired girl"
4. Good descriptions in your description tag: "Hi resolution image of a girl with great bokeh"
5. Nice formatted links including the description of the nex image if this apply: href="beautiful-girl-with-roses.html"

Answer 2

Image sites are all about the authority of the site i.e

• Back link quality and relevancy
• Age of the site
• Social interaction
• Regular freshen content
• Regular added content

You only need to search "Image of Flowers" and "Flowers Backgrounds" to see that Google does in fact rank 'thin content' on certain topics and searches, of course adding text content would help but of course if people want just images then simply adding content to satisfy the search engines would affect user experience because all people want is the images.

Google Image Search (Unique Images Preferred)

Unique images work best as Google has the ability to see if images are already stored somewhere else online, you can check this by dragging a image from Desktop into Google search and it'll scan for duplicates and well if they can tell that they can easily detect duplicates which ultimately may lead to less Google image search clicks).

With LESS you need MORE

Generally with LESS you need MORE, but with this said if everyone in the same category has LESS then you don't need as much of MORE. Social media is most likely your best bet as pictures can go viral which will help your SEO from all the social mentions and because more people see it they could even link using their blog or something.

Adding additional markup may help slightly but generally it's not treated as much as everyone would hope, off the page signals are still the most contributing ranking factor.

Suggestions that won't gimp the user experience and promote better search rankings

• If possible and economy viable use a CDN to host the static files such as 'JS, CSS, JPG, PNG and so on' (Google does reward fast sites).
• Adding a comment system might improve user experience while making the content that little bit less THIN and can be treated as a page update which is a big plus to 'Freshen Content'.
• Ensure that the ALT describes the image well, a short sentence is ideal i.e `Pink Sunflower in a farmers field' rather than 'Sunflower'.

Many other ways on what are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?

Answer 3

Add Image tags like

<img src="server.jpg" alt="server" />

Also name the image related to the content

Checkout http://diythemes.com/thesis/wordpress-seo-image-optimization/