SEO for pictures

Recently, I am designing a business website which would be publishing online magazines, they include sports, car, games, life style, PC, fashion and health staffs like that. For people to know my website, of course, SEO is something that i should be doing even before my web goes public.

Becoz of the nature of my website, a lot of photos and pics (like magazines' covers or content) have to be displayed, so that people can decide which magazines they want to subscribe for download or view online.

When i was doing the SEO for my website (routine like, mag tag, title tag, lots of related key words), suddenly i was thinking "why don't do SEO for my pics as i got lots of them?"

Yes, i am just like everybody else, i have never heard of something like that. SEO for Pictures? You must be kidding right. By what if we could?

This seems to be a contradicting ideas to SEO since "pics or photos" are often regarded as obstacles to crawlers to index our webpages, becoz crawlers can't read pictures. It is often advised not to use too many pics (or frames) as they will push key words (related to your website content) even further down your page and it's harder for crawlers to index.

But when i try to look at "search engine" from a different angle, i start to rethink "Are pictures really obstacles for SEO?"

When you can't find sites with content that you are looking for from Google or Yahoo, what would you do? You start to think of the alternative.

If i can't find it by "Web", i will find it by "Images". So you start to search by images that related to the content. Let say you are looking for "TIME" magazine, you will tape in "time magazine" and search by images in Google. The reason behine is indeed very simple, if the site shows a related photo(s), it may very much has the related topic.

Have you ever have a similar experience before? I often do when i am on the searcher side of the table.

Using the above example, for the word "time magazine" searching in Google images, how does Google decide which photos are related and which are not? The answers rely on the pics' file name. Every pic indeed is a separate webpage (with your Domain name at the front and file name at the back) . If the pic file name contains the words "time magazine", it will shows up in the search results. You can see millions of websites, but all their pics got the word "time or usually time magazine". For my search result at Google: "about 439,000 sites could be found", and the pics for time.com comes in the 3rd and 16th place for the first page search result.

TIME magazine cover has file name like the one below:
://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/2006/1101060320_400.jpg and therefore they are shown in the search result.

Although I admit that for the words "time magaine", the result was not satisfactory even though over 90% of the result pics are actually "TIME" magazine covers. Mostly becoz most of them are not coming from "TIME" site or related TIME global sites beside the two pictures coming from time.com on the first page. It may involve a little more complex fomula than i thought how crawlers index pictures (if not, then all the TIME covers from time.com should be theortically shown up, since they all share similar file name), but it does give us some insight and ideas about how people search for content through "Images" search and how they can be matched if we actually start to think "SEO for pictures".

Moreover, "Images" search can give me a vivid result as a searcher to see if the content does match what i am looking for. Of course, like all other SEO tools, one way is not better than the other and no one method is perfect under all circumstances. It all depends.

I hope this is a SEO tool worth spending time on and hope that i can give you guys a positive research in the future.

Best,
Lam Tsz Him