When searching the web on Google it should be no surprise that you can search by web page, video, news, and of course images. Occasionally I will do an image search when I am interested in a given topic and when an image appeals to me I will typically view the page and search the website that provided the image. I may even bookmark the website and revisit over time. Clearly the image search tool provides a potential to bring in new site traffic and regular visitors, which of course has the benefit of an improved SEO ranking.
Not long back the idea of searching images wasn’t really a consideration. The reason that Google created the search by image tool is in response to the rise of social media and social sharing websites. Such social platforms have made “shareability” one of the most important considerations of what is considered good content. Because of the importance of social media in SEO ranking you should be including your “optimized” images on your various social networks, Flickr, Google+, etc. Most social networks will allow you to include keywords, captions and/or descriptions with your images. Just be sure to add a link back to your website and primary social media (Facebook) to increase your chance of garnering inbound traffic.
Image Search Optimization Strategies:
When clients provide me their images most will have a digital camera title such as IMG_0778. This of course tells the search engines nothing about what the image is about. My suggestion would be to retitle your images to something short yet descriptive. If for example you have a website that features parrots, and your image is of a female rainbow lory, retitle the image to rainbow-lory-female.jpg. This will help ensure that your images are included within an image search listing, and it makes the image more ADA (American Disabilities Act) compliant (of course we would also use the “ALT” tag as well for image description). It is important to note that even if your image has a non-descriptive file name, it is still possible that the image will be viewed in a search since the page content will also be indexed and images on the page that correspond to the search query may be shown.
From an SEO standpoint the best (top-ranked) websites will research the keywords and phrases/terms which are most searched for by their audience. Your web designer or SEO consultant may use this knowledge to retitle your images, but I can tell you from experience having looked at hundreds of websites designed by others that very few retitle the images provided by their clients. The lack of retitling of images is likely a need to work within the cost parameters of a web design project, and since the website is ultimately the business owner’s responsibility you should get in the habit of retitling your images yourself before you hand them off to your designer. Just know that if you’re file name has more than one word, separate them by dashes (or hyphens) and not underscores. Also, Google recommends you only use common image file types, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF or BMP. My recommendation is .jpg unless the image needs to be on a transparent background, then .png or .gif is best. Bitmap files (.bmp) – often the output from scanned documents are generally larger in file size so not recommended for web use.
As I noted above, in addition to a keyword rich image names you should ensure that your images to have an “ALT” tag in place in the web page code. This tag is used by adaptive technology (and read by the search engines) to provide additional information about the content of a picture/image. If you can incorporate some keywords naturally, great, but make certain that the content is representative of what is being shown not a listing of keywords (keyword stacking will lower your ranking). If you are not familiar with the ALT tag it looks like this:
<img src=”images/rainbow-lory-female.jpg” alt=”Female Rainbow Lory Parrot playing with orange ball on top of bird cage” width=”292″ height=”420″ />
Note that if your image is provided as a navigation link to another page also include a bit of text that is relevant to the content of the page it links to, and a “title tag” as well.
On some websites there will be a bit of text for a link to an image, such as “click to View Image”. This link (known as anchor text) should also include those targeted keywords that describes the image. So instead of having the link text read “click to view image” change it to “click to view picture/s of female rainbow lory parrot”, etc.
Image placement is another consideration that I don’t think most new designers really consider. As I noted above Google will index and include images in a search based solely on the type of content on a page and the images placement near the text content. If your page has a text block about rainbow lory parrots play behavior and favorite toys yet the adjacent images don’t correspond to the text copy, then sure, the image/s may be shown in an image search but it unlikely they will be clicked upon since they don’t relate to the keyword terms. In this regard place the pictures next or near the keyword related content of your web page.
If you’ve read my other SEO posts you know that inbound links are important. One way to help this along is by linking directly to your images. Google’s Picasa web album is one way to acquire inbound links to your images and website (I’m of the belief that Google ranks their own properties higher than others), your social media efforts is another option, and of course adding your images and links to other reputable websites. Remember that people are visual, so by adding quality images to sites that link to your primary pages is a great SEO strategy.
On a final note consider using “Rich Snippets”. I have begun using rich snippets in my own website, and since this is a Google convention it should be considered for all business websites. Rich snippets can be a bit complicated to understand, but in short they are designed to summarize the content of a page in a way that makes it even easier for users to understand what the page is about in search results. You can learn more about rich snippets at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2722261
Best of luck in your web design efforts, and as always if you need assistance please feel free to contact me.
https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com
