Using Images In Your Search Engine Optimization
Posted on | May 1, 2006 | No Comments
A growing number of people are using search engines to find online images that relate to their interests and needs. So if you have a business website that contains pictures or graphics, you can use them as part of your search engine optimization strategy to draw traffic to your site.
For example, let’s say you sell fine art photographs. And somebody does an image search for “fine art photography” on Google Image Search. The results display a page full of thumbnail images. The user clicks on one of yours, which opens a new page showing both the image and your webpage.
It stands to reason that you might just make a sale from that visit. You might not, but you might! So it pays to think about your online images as potential traffic-generating tools.
Image Search Engines
Both Google and Yahoo! boast they give their users access to billions of online pictures. This doesn’t represent every picture on the web, but the number of images being indexed is growing. Other image search engine contenders include:
- Altavista
- AllTheWeb
- AskJeeves
- MSN
- Lycos
- Picsearch
- Ditto
Helping Searchers Find Your Site Through Images
You might assume that the secret to helping searchers find your pictures is your image alt tags. These are the HTML tags that allow you to apply a text description to an image. It looks like this in your source code:
<img src=”/images/logo.jpg” alt=”Search Engine Positioning”>
In this example, the words “Search Engine Positioning” are the image alt tag. They can be seen when the user places his mouse over this image online. Search engine spiders also can “see” this tag in your coding.
But simply putting “Search Engine Positioning” in your alt tag does not guarantee your image shows up in the #1 spot (or at all) for that keyword phrase. That’s because search engines use complicated algorithms for indexing and ranking pictures, and the image alt tag is NOT the only variable. In fact, it isn’t even one of the main variables.
Google Image Search
In Google’s information pages on image search, the image alt tag doesn’t even rate a mention. Instead, Google says its spiders figure out what an image is about by “analyzing the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption and dozens of other factors.” It also sorts images according to quality.
So, it’s entirely possible that your picture might not show up at all in an image search for its alt tag text UNLESS that same text also appears in the on-page content, in the caption, and several other places.
As always with Google, content is key. So make sure the text and captions near your photos / graphics contain the search terms you have selected. More tips are coming up later in this article.
Yahoo! Image Search
Yahoo!’s image search function can be accessed directly from Yahoo!’s home page by clicking on the “images” navigation tab. Simply enter your search terms and the system will return results with up to 20 thumbnail images per page.
To get a sense of how Yahoo! image search works, type in “fine art photography”. The very first thumbnail displayed (at the time of this posting) has an image alt tag that says “fine art photograph 5″. However, the exact search term fine art photography appears in the caption text beside the picture. So Yahoo!, like Google, considers caption text in its indexing and ranking methodology.
For a comparison, click the second thumbnail on the results page. This image has NO image alt tag at all. Nor does it have a caption or any other copy on the page. What it DOES have is the words fine art photography in the title and description tags, and the hyphenated term fine_art repeated twice in the page name (http://www.efitzgerald.com/fine_art/fine_art_bw_3.htm).
This reinforces what we already know about search engine optimization in general: the importance of the title tag and the value of subpage names that contain keywords. Note: An image with an underscored or hyphenated image file name, such as fine-art-photography.jpg, gets better rankings for the term fine art photography than would a picture labeled fineartphotography.jpg.
Summing Up
In the future, words may lose their importance when it comes to image search. Cutting edge technology created by Pixlogic is able to read an actual image, not the words around it, and retrieve similar images from a database.
But it could be a while before that technology migrates to the search engine world. Until then, here are some tips on how optimization of your website images can help you attract new visitors to your site:
1. Optimize the content and captions near your images with your top keyword phrase.
2. Be sure the title and description tags for each page are correctly optimized.
3. Optimize your alt tags as part of your overall strategy, not as a stand-alone tactic.
4. Whenever possible, create page names AND picture file names that include the top keyword phrase, hyphenated or separated in some other manner.
5. Use only high quality images.
A Word on Image Theft
And finally, you may be worried that making your images too accessible to searchers might lead to them being used without your permission. The major engines allow you to remove images you’d like to keep out of the search results.
Also, if you find one of your images has been reproduced without your permission, read our article on Search Engine Positioning copyright violation to find out what you can do about it.
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