Summary: Google issues image guidelines, just as it issues guidelines for content – and to get your images ranked in Google, you just need to follow them. The guidelines are explained here.
As well as gaining traffic for your website through Google’s image search, it makes sense to optimise your images as this makes your site faster and can positively impact your SEO in other ways.
Just as for content, when it comes to image searching, Google likes to deliver a really good experience to its users. It therefore issues guidelines for optimising your images and promises to rank your images higher in its result if you follow them. Google recommends you provide it with a sitemap with URLs of your images (you can do this through Google’s Webmaster Tools) in case it doesn’t find all of them through crawling your site.
1. Avoid embedding text inside your images
This is recommended because search engines can’t read the text within your images.
2. Name your images well
This helps Google understand what the image is. A lot of digital cameras name images with undescriptive file names, such as DSC00001.jpg which tells Google nothing. ‘car.jpg’ is better than ‘DSC00001.jpg’. ‘red-car.jpg’ is better still. ‘red-ferrari-2009.jpg’ is better than that. And so on.
3. Use descriptive ‘alt’ text
Alt text tells Google something about your image. In addition, users who are visually impaired, and people with slow internet connections, may not be able to see the image and will get the alt text instead. So a good image description in the alt text is good for SEO and good for user experience too.
A poor use of alt text:
<img src="red-ferrari-2009.jpg" alt="" />
A better use of alt text:
<img src="red-ferrari-2009.jpg" alt="red car" />
A much better use of alt text:
<img src="red-ferrari-2009.jpg" alt="2009 Red Ferrari" />
Don’t ever fill your alt text with keywords (‘keyword stuffing’). Not only does it provide a poor user experience but Google will easily detect it and penalise your site in the rankings as a result.
4. Ensure images are in context
Google will pay attention to what else is on your page when deciding how relevant your image is, and whether to rank it well. If your page is about red ferraris and your picture is of a red ferrari, you’re sending a clear and consistent message to Google about the picture and it can be confident the picture is indeed a red ferrari.
5. Optimise your images for speed
Use software like fireworks to do this. Faster pages will be ranked better in Google – again they make for a better user experience.
6. …but ensure they are still good quality
Although Google can’t ’see’ the quality of your image, if you present a clear and good quality image, other websites are likely to link to it, a benefit in Google’s ‘eyes’.
7. Specify width and height for all images
The user’s web browser can start rendering the page as long as it knows the dimensions of your image. So this speeds up your page and improves user experience. Google does pay attention to page speed for rankings.
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