How do I improve positioning in Google Images?

[EcommerceSite]

Looking around in Webmaster tools today and I noticed we have hundreds of thousands of impressions in Google Images, but a very low CTR. I understand normal SEO, but what about increasing rank in Google Images? It is hard to get links straight to an image, and we already use proper alt tags. Any other ideas?

[YouON]

The ranking of images is strictly related to the trust rank of the domain (beyond on page factors), I think. Are you sure is it a "rank position" problem? If you are getting impressions probably you are already visible. Are your images nice and big? Which kind of images your audience is looking for? Just my point of view...

[EcommerceSite]

The average position for the pictures is normally in the triple digits. For example one of our top images gets about 1600 impressions a month, and it ranks at 160. This is about the case for the other 12,000 things as well. So if instead of ranking roughly 160 it was ranked higher the CTR would go up.

[Everett]

You can try these tips if you haven't already:

Optimize the image filename.

Have another look at the alt text for each image and ensure it is optimized.

Link to the image from the image. For example:

Make sure your images are big and beautiful.

Differentiate your images from others if they are not exclusive to your site. For instance, you could resize them, change the hue a little, run auto-levels on it, mirror it, crop it, etc...

Consider submitting an image sitemap.

Hotlink to the image from a guest post on another site.

Good luck!