How to manage images

[PottyScotty]

We have been using Google+ to load our images straight on to our site, we did this to make sure our site loaded fast. google+ delivers them to website at the size we specify, so even if original is say 4000px x 3000px we can ask for them at 100x100 and they send as resized scale. we dont have to manage sizes just the original images and their tagging

If we wanted to improve our SEO opportunities should we be doing this another way?  Our images show if you look in the image serp but they dont appear on the main serp.

How much of a difference would having the images on our own domain rather than having them on Google+

I am working through the recommended list below, would love to hear guys who are doing well with images and have to manage 1000's of them.

There are a number of ways to optimise your images to increase your visibility within Google image search, and the chance of being featured within the main search results (as seen in the 'tablet PC' example):

Use a short descriptive piece of text featuring desired keywords within the image alt text attribute.
Save the image using a descriptive file name
Create an Image XML sitemap
Ensure your images directory isn't blocked by robots.txt
Ideally host images on the same domain
And surround the image with related text content to build a stronger page context/association

[artdivision]

Hi mark,

Firstly I do not think that they suppose to rank on normal serp....if you got the rank on google image serp thats the best you will get. The 15th of November update focused on Google Image SERP and did boost lots of web sites that have dedicated landing pages with image presentation about specific products. It happened in one of my test blogs I use for testing various techniques to see what work and what doesnt.

I did none of the optimisations you mention above, but I did on-page optimise the web page that hosts the image for the keywords I wanted it to rank, used top navigation anchors and that was it. No image alt tag, no resizing, nothing. Google just picked it up and ranked it.

As I was testing the blog for link building and not image rankings that is what i can offer you atm and that was the effect it had on me with the 14th of november update. We are talking about 83.000% increase on impressions on Google Webmaster tools. so all I can advise is, do have a landing page with all your image products there but optimise the landing page for the keywords and not the image itself necessarily. Ofcourse doing the latter wont harm you but make sure that the page is optimised as well to be on the best/perfect side.