As Google, Yahoo! & the major engines dive into rich media and alternative data sources (news, video, images, etc.), it's important for SEOs to keep on top of the changes and how best to optimize for them. Image searches are already a great source of traffic for sites that offer them and hosting your own image content on your site can bring in extra traffic, particularly if you're serving the types of pages & images that image searchers are seeking.

Currently, there aren't any web tools for seeing the number or kinds of image searches that are being done, but common sense can help, just as it did before Overture & Wordtracker existed. Think about the content you serve and imagine related search terms that would yield images - think along the lines of searchers seeking images for:

• School projects, reports or presentations
• Diagrams for use on their own websites or in papers
• Artistic photography for use in creative media or to Photoshop
• Images of famous/notable persons/places/things
• Photos of a region or specific landmark

If your site can serve these, make sure to link your images to a page on the subject and provide alt tags. Also, serving the same image on multiple pages (if appropriate) can lend additional credit in image searches. Don't forget, too, that Google offers image search by size, and often ranks by size as well, so if you have high-res copies, offering them somewhere on your site can be helpful.