While vertical search is still in its infancy, the integration of vertical results through Google Universal and Ask 3D are allowing sites to draw more and more visitors from specialty indexes. One of the vertical search indexed that is becoming more and more popular is image search. Unfortunately, many small businesses are overlooking traffic opportunities by not optimizing the images on their sites. Pat B. Doyle has a great post on using images to drive traffic at her blog.

In the post, Pat points out that image search results are now often showing up on the first page of engines like Google and Ask.

Here's a screen shot I took at Google today after a search for the phrase "birthday cake."

You'll note there are three images from the Google image database showing up at the top of the listings. Since I'm hunting for ideas for my son's first birthday cake, I'm far more likely to click on images than on the standard text results. In fact, I'd wager there are quite a few keyword phrases that are likely to send a fair amount of image search traffic.

But how do you optimize your site for image search?

Pat has a few simple tips.

Use descriptive file names for your images.

Use the alt attribute on your images.

Use captions or descriptive text near the image.