The results that come up for a google image search can often be surprising, confusing, and sometimes cosmically hilarious.  Usually, though,  it seems that the images that come up from an image search are not as equally relevent as the web sites that come up when you do a web search. This is because images are not being optimized to the same extent that websites are. This allows many to seize the opportunity of focusing on optimizing their images for an image search and see more substantial results because of less competition. Keep in mind,  Google image searchs can bring the same amount of traffic to your site as the regular google web search.

One crucial step in optimizing for Google's image search specifically is utilizing the enhanced image search specifications under the google sitemaster's tool. You will need a Google account to access these tools, but it'll be well worth it because in this section you can categorize your own images to match the way in which Google sorts and categorizes the search results.

Upload your images to be as large as possible. Having bigger images that link from thumbnails can greatly increase the preference for that image amongst Google's spiders. Bigger pictures are given more priority over smaller ones.

Utilizing particular characters within your image's title can affect how Google interprets it. If you use dashes, Google will translate each dash as a space. A word with one dash will be read as two words by Google's spiders. This can help better match your image to a potential search.

You can also check to make sure that Google has your image files indexed, and take steps to resubmit them if they aren't showing up. You can view the images for a particular site by using site: http:// [desired website address] within Google's search field.

Other methods are  utilizing all relevent html tags (i.e. alt and longdesc) and  making sure to give a relevent name to the the image ( see more on this in my previous post).