The Power of Labeling Images

Kevin Day, October 6th, 2008

In my Google Analytics account, I noticed a few visitors arriving via Google Image searches. It turns out that this picture got a lot of Google juice and is the first image search result for the term “smiley pumpkin“.

What’s surprising is that that term doesn’t appear anywhere in the page or this site except for within the image tag:

<img src="http://codeswimming.com/images/smiley_pumpkin.jpg"

 title="Smiley Pumpkin" alt="Smiley Pumpkin" width="500" height="375"/>

This blog only has a page rank of 1, yet by including the same search term in the file name, image title, and alt text, it got to the top of Google, albeit for a low-volume search term. There also don’t seem to be any links to that image from any other site that I can find.

This only has limited SEO use, however, because that post and my blog are not in the general web search results for the same term. Google seems to keep the two sets of results completely separate.

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