I built a WordPress site for a friend to showcase his bakery products and I am currently the #1 result for “chocolate strawberry cake”. I’m so honored for a number of reasons. Google images reports it has over 3 million images results for the phrase, and my big beautiful Nikon picture is on the top of that very big, and mostly delicious looking pile of cakes.

How Did I Win the Chocolate Strawberry Cake Popularity Contest in Google Images?

1. Well, first, I took quality photos with a camera that might be considered an entry level professional rig – the Nikon D-60. I also bought 3 Nikon lenses and a professional grade Nikon flash unit. So I got started with about $2,000 worth of photography gear.
2. Next, I made the picture look as beautiful as I could using PhotoShop CS3. I’ve actually been using Photoshop professionally for more than 15 years and it’s too much fun to call it part of my work.
3. I put several sizes of the picture on the website with the largest being about 1 MB in total size and 2500 pixels wide. Wow, that’s a lot of high resolution cake.
4. I got the site ranking well and garnered an overall PR2 for the homepage which helps me to get interior pages some home made link juice by linking right from my own homepage.
5. Eventually the picture got really popular and the website for the last 4 months has done nearly 10 GB (Wow that’s Ten Giga Bytes) of bandwidth a month. For a bakery that’s through the roof. I have Google Analytics installed on the site so they do know how popular the site is. I don’t know if that is factored into the reason they put my picture at a #1 position but I would hope so. This is one of the Holy Grail questions in SEO and I need to get to the bottom of it. Did Google actually apply the popularity it can grasp from Google Analytics to help rank this photo at #1? I would love to know and I will let you know if I find out.

So my advice to you if you are looking for a #1 picture in Google images is “don’t try to game the system”. Just walk the walk. Is that the “Cake Walk?”