But the source at #10 was surprising. Google image search. It’s funny how integrated (and popular) it’s become in our daily web habits, yet mostly overlooked in terms of SEO and traffic. I’ve been doing some digging around Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman’s talk at SES to get some numbers to share with you.

He stated that an incredible 300 million digital photos are taken every day.  100 billion images taken per year. Pittman also stated there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.

That’s pretty staggering. And this is a trend that will likely see continued hockey-stick growth.

Image optimization has been important ever since Google unveiled Universal (or blended) Search.

Check out these above the fold results for Pete Rose:

That’s seven, count em, seven quality image slots that are likely driving a nifty amount of traffic to their respective owners. There have been plenty of studies done to show that images not only increase click-throughs, but consumer engagement as well. You can imagine how well this would work for ecommerce sites.

I don’t need to write a treatise on how to rank in Google for images but allow me to share some best practices.

Always include alt attributes in your <img source> tags. Name the image files appropriately and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. Overall site authority and PageRank will obviously be important here as well.

A f ew other low-hanging fruit tactics are to add images to your Google Local Business profile.  You can also enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.  Try to add images to local business citation sources whenever possible.  Include images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

And one last crucial tidbit to keep in mind. Pittman stated, “If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high.” So remember folks, using high quality imagery pays off for both user experience and SEO.

There’s much more to speak of on this topic but it shall have to wait for another post. Hopefully today, we’ve given you some insight into the importance of image search.

We have organized these moments into the following categories:

• Organic Web Search
• Paid Text Ads
• Organic Image Search
• Organic Video Search
• Organic Maps Search
• Social Networking Sites
• Mobile Search
• Website Landing Pages
• Analytics and Measurement

Download the PDF to learn 50 Ways Search Marketing Can Change Consumer Behavior

“I was doing a bunch of web searches,” he said. “And most of what I found were results for listings on Lakehouse.com and other lakehouse listing websites. And while this gave me good visibility to individual properties, it wasn’t helping me answer the question of what lake might be the best place to buy.”

Having identified several lakes, he started typing the lake names into his search query. Surprisingly, he wasn’t able to find anything that gave a good overview of the lakes he was interested in. That is until he clicked out of curiosity on the “Image” search link at the top of Google’s search page.

The image search brought up a host of photographs and one detailed map of a lake. He said he clicked on the lake map and was taken to a realtor’s page who specialized in properties on the private lake in question. Having learned a bit more about the lake in general, he then looked at some of the listings highlighted by this realtor. After viewing several listings, he was required to register in order to see more. He did and eventually found a small lakehouse that really appealed to him.

Within 5 minutes, the realtor associated with the website called to see if she could answer any questions about the lake or the specific properties he was interested in. After a few more e-mails my buddy made an appointment through this realtor to visit the property to have a look for himself.

Talk about a successful conversion funnel! This realtor had generated trial in a matter of minutes, initiated by a search-optimized lake map that was a part of her lake overview landing page. And what a timely example of what Brian MacDonald outlined in his recent post: Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are the New Home Page.