Optimizing for Google Images

With the growth in blogs and the need to find images to illustrate their pages, people  use Google Images, rightly or wrongly, to find a suitable image. Unfortunately, the technology is not quite able to understand what an image shows and therefore it still has to be rely on the information that goes along with image in the web page code. If you do it properly, Google images can be another source of traffic to your site and it is still an avenue of SEO that is under used when performing on-page optimization. Ensure your server is able to show images on other websites. There is some reluctance for some website to do this as it can be used to steal bandwidth. Check your robots.txt to make sure that you have allowed robots access to the images folder that you wish to be indexed.

When an image is clicked in Google images it uses frames to show the image and the page which it came from. Some people just click on the image and it will open a copy of the image. This can divert page views because they did not really visit your site. Some webmasters recommend that JavaScript be used to break the frameset and cause clicking on the image to go directly to the site.

Keep images in a directory called images. If you have adult images it is a good idea to keep them in a separate folder which is labelled adult images. This may help your non-adult images from being filtered as adult images.

Filename – make a good descriptive name to take away the guesswork. Let’s say you have an image of a book. You could call it book.jpg but you could call it ‘{title}-book.jpg’ where {title} is the title of the book, obviously. This would be more likely to return a result for your site for an image search for that particular book.

Use alt attributes to describe the content of the image. (This should be done for all images to ensure that they have descriptive information about the image.) You can also use the title attribute also. If the image is really important then a caption is also a good idea.

We can see from this example taken from Google image the information that Google displays for a typical image. This information includes  the start of the text to the page alongside the image, its dimensions, filetype and page the site where it came from.

Rather than linking directly to a larger version of the image you could make an individual page for it and optimize that page for all important images giving you the opportunity to add title and meta information. This certainly seems to work. On a gallery site that I have, larger images have been placed in their own pages have been indexed fully.

Google Image bot is the spider that crawls for images. It is widely believed that the Image bot does not spider sites frequently and it may take six months to a year to crawl you site again. However looking at my own site images, the images that are currently being shown for this site are quite recent,  so it has either visited recently or it may be that this has changed. I will need to check this and see when new images are indexed.

Search engines will largely ignore images in the sidebars of a websites as these often contain advertisements.

Conduct searches on image search to see which images have been indexed. This be done using a site search while in Google images.

Important images that you don’t want people to use for their own websites can have a URL added somewhere in the corner. People can still take the image but it will show your URL and there may be small chance of visitors from this also.