How does SEO work for image websites?

I'm thinking of putting together a website that will be primarily image based content. Most of the traffic would be social media but how would SEO work? I'm mean I know the obvious, alt tags, sitemap with image tags, normal meta tags and title optimization.

But what about there being no content on the pages? What does Google think about that? Will it just not rank the pages if it can't find a good chunk of text to process?

It could rank in google images but for the normal search try adding some content atleast, image captions or anything is better than nothing.

If you want to rank in Google Search (web, not image search) and the keywords you want to rank for aren't "images of [something]", you will likely need unique text on them pages.

adding some content your post
use alt tag maybe useful

i think it is hard for image only content to rank, better use social sharing to get traffic

You may add descriptions and optimize your images so your website loads faster.

add some seo text below the pics you show.

You can take good care of all the image-specific elements (names, titles and alts), add Schema Markup to your pages, but still, Google will probably use the whole page to determine the relevancy of an image. So you can optimize an image, but with almost no content it is less likely to rank than the image wrapped into some relative content and supported contextually.

Take a look at your top competitors and see what they are doing...Most likely they will be using some sort of text/description with images for the sake of "content", so they can get the pages indexed.

Here are a few things I found are effective when ranking a img website:

1) Name all your pictures the KWs you want to rank for BEFORE you upload them to your site so your permalink to the pic is a KW.

2) Use alt tags for all your pictures that are a variance or a synonym of your KW.

3) Name the image your KW once it is uploaded.

4) Add a description to your image once it is uploaded.

5) Backlink the image urls as well as the pages they are posted on.

also:
insert hyphens or underscores in between keyphrases so instead of blackhatworld.jpg it would be black-hat-world.jpg

There is a big difference between infographics and images if you really wants to make a website with just images and no content just tell me why would anyone wants to visit your website because you really can not provide information about the topic without any text content.

jamie3000 said:

I'm thinking of putting together a website that will be primarily image based content. Most of the traffic would be social media but how would SEO work? I'm mean I know the obvious, alt tags, sitemap with image tags, normal meta tags and title optimization.

But what about there being no content on the pages? What does Google think about that? Will it just not rank the pages if it can't find a good chunk of text to process?

Click to expand...

Nowadays, Google recognizing the image based content. Here are the steps to rank your image based website,

As always keyword is most important. So, the first step is to select the keyword which is high in search volume and low in competition.
The second step you have to do is On-page optimization which includes the following,

The file names of the images should be properly named. So, you have to avoid these kinds of file names include picture-1.jpg and Defaultpic.jpg.
Use alt tags (it will be better to keep alt tag under 140 characters for best results).
Image compression is most important because Google focuses a lot on the site speed.
Try to keep an optimized number of images on the front page

The next thing you have to do is off-page optimization.
Water marking images can help you drive a good amount of traffic and also helps in branding as well.
Add the option to share images on social media networks like Facebook, Pinterest with one click.
Constant updating of images