Don’t Forget Image Searches!
September 12th, 2007It is easy to become lost in the quest to rank well on search engines for standard text searches. However, let us not forget a relatively new but increasingly popular form of searching – image searching. Google and many other search engines now also index images extracted from the sites that they crawl. A smart webmaster can take advantage of this feature to drive even more traffic to his or her website. But first, you must know how these search engines decide which images to display for a certain search phrase.
There are basically three aspects of an image that search engines look for to categorize them.
- Image name. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you have an image of, say, Bruce Springsteen, you should name it something along the lines of “Bruce_Springsteen.jpg”. Unrelated image names will be far less likely to appear on search results.
- Image alt tag. This functions pretty much the same as the image name. When inserting an image into your website, you should always include the alt tag, making it a short but descriptive blurb about your image. For example, for the Bruce_Springsteen.jpg image mentioned above, a good alt tag might be “Bruce Springsteen performing at Nissan.” If you do not know how to use alt tags, they go like this:
- <img src=”bruce_springsteen.jpg” alt=”Bruce Springsteen performing at Nissan.” />
- Image context. This is the topic of the page the image is nested in. If you have a Bruce Springsteen image displayed in a page that talks about how The Beatles are the best band ever, you are putting that image in bad context, and hurting its ranking. However, if a search engine comes to your page that is talking about how Bruce Springsteen came to Nissan Pavilion last May and wowed the crowd with songs from his new CD “Dust and Devils”, that will put your image in favorable context and help its ranking.
Remember these three pointers when including images in your website and you should be able to obtain even more search traffic.
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By Jessie Walker on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
I just checked my referrer stats and I do see some traffic coming in from Google image search. Nothing major, but then again my site does not have many images on this. I can see how this would be very important for something like a desktop wallpaper site though.
By Mel on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
Good thing to keep in mind – thanks!
By Doug Anders on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
I always make sure to name my images accordingly and give them descriptive alt tags. I tend to post images frequently on my blog, but i’ve never actually checked to see how much traffic is coming in through image searching.
By ashtin on Sep 12, 2007 | Reply
does it make any difference for seo if an image is named brucespringsteen.jpg, bruce-springsteen.jpg, or bruce_springsteen.gif?
By malawika on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
Hi nbakewell! Nice site! Good work, keep it up :)
I always have tags in my images on my blogs.
Doug Anders, you can check the informations about Google search engine in Google Webmaster Tools.
By Nick on Sep 18, 2007 | Reply
ashtin,
Google and other search engines are fairly good at extracting keywords from a string that is not hyphenated. However, it is the best practice to use “-” or “_” when naming images – which one you use does not really matter.