My strange story about image optimisation.

Firstly, I regard myself as a google search for image addict. I've been at it for years as my site is rich in graphics, and thousands of visitors a month come through that route.

But recently, with the changes in google, i decided to optimise even more by placing a descriptive and informative passage of text about the image (e'g the mating habits of the Gwondalaland Tit Mouse:), and see if this would affect my rankings in google images. I hadn't been too worried about image optimisation anyway as I already saw no decline when google changed it's text based search method. It was more of an experiment to see if i could get further up the image search ladder.

That was about 3 weeks ago. The new optimised images haven't even appeared on Google yet, but...Yegods! I checked my google stats yesterday. It seems that google text search had picked up the new image pages and my rankings for one went from nowhere to Number 1 (for a very popular search term) and many other to the top ten. As a result visits have increased enormously.

A strange google world, but it makes me think that google places brownie points on having images (large sized?) relevant to some descriptive text in a search? Who knows, but I am rushing to do similar pages in similar formats and see what higher perches I can land on. I'm also eager to see when and if my images climb the image searches as well.

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Jeremy