Google Image Search: How to SEO-Optimize Images to Get Higher Rankings

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They say it is better to see once than to hear 100 times. That is why most websites make use of visuals at least to some extent.  There are also certain types of sites (stock photography sites or photography blogs) that CONSIST primarily of images. For such websites, ranking highly in Google Images is often the only way to get Web traffic.

In this post, I’m going to dwell on optimizing images for Google’s Image Search. And, let us begin with the most important issues.

Alt text

When posting an image to your site, create an alt text for it. What’s alt text? “Alt”stands for “alternative”, and it is basically the textual representation of your image. Search engines cannot read images, thus, they judge by the alt text to figure out what’s in your picture.

Alt text is intended for situations when the image on the page cannot be loaded (to give users an idea about your pic). It also benefits visually impaired people who use special programs to surf the Web, in which case the app will read out the alt text.

Be smart about your alt text. What does this mean? Say, there is a picture of the ocean that you took on the morning of November 4^th. So, instead of calling it “the pic I took on November 4^th“, call it “ocean view” or similar. Using your main keywords in the alt text is vital.

Context

The context in which your image stands is also of great importance. Google’s image bot is believed to first look at your alt text and then match it to the rest of the text on your page. Thus, make sure these are related.

A good illustration of the image-context connection would be this. Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on how to create killer landing pages. The post had 2 images, one of which had an alt text that read “convertible airplane landing”, and the other one was called “landing page scheme”. Now, when I look up “landing page scheme” on Google Images, I get both images in the search results:

As you see, both images rank for this key phrase. This means Google DOES use context to decide what picture is relevant for the query.

Image URL

You probably know about the importance of having an SEO-friendly URL structure on your site. What I’m talking about is that, instead of having dynamic URLs that look something like this:

www.example.com/showitem.php?category=34&item=146,

it’s better to create static URLs that look something like this:

swww.example.com/kitchenware/electric-kettle.html

Same is recommended for image URLs. An SEO-friendly image URL would be:

example.com/books/science-fiction/citizen-of-the-galaxy.jpg

Many SEO’s believe that Google also looks at your image URL to determine whether your picture is relevant for a particular keyword.

Image size

There is no ideal image size described anywhere in Google’s Guideline. However, it’s been noticed, that images sized from 300×200 to 1200×900 pixels tend to perform the best. The general rule that applies here is that the image should be neither too big, nor too small, otherwise Google will consider them inconvenient for the users to view.

Besides, as far as the image’s width and height is concerned, 4:3 is considered to be the optimum ratio, since, if you look at an average Google Images results page, most images will be 4:3. If your image is, like, 5:1, Google will most likely crop it to display in the SERPs.

Indexing

Another important thing to do is to make sure that your picture is not restricted from indexing with a robots.txt file or similar. Also, the more often you upload new images to your site, the more frequently Google image bot will stop by.

It also helps to add your images to the XML sitemap. This way they will get indexed faster and will not be overlooked by the search engines.

Internal and external linking

Ok, let us clear up what you are supposed to do in regards to linking from and to your images. As far as internal linking is concerned, it definitely helps to link your images to other pages on your site (just as it is the case with interlinking webpages). For instance, you can link your image to your picture gallery. While doing that, pay attention to the image’s title (it kind of works like an anchor text, but does not have that much of an impact).

As for external linking, Google does not seem to rely on incoming links to your picture as much as it relies on backlinks when ranking webpages. To get an idea about your image’s authority, Google reportedly looks at something we’re just about to discuss – hotlinks.

To allow or to disallow hotlinking?

Hotlinking is linking to somebody else’s content, so that the users visiting your site can load the piece of content DIRECTLY from the original poster’s server. For example, if you embed a YouTube video on your blog, the video itself will be located on a YouTube server, while it will be possible to view it without leaving your blog. All in all, hotlinking is considered unethical, as it steals one’s bandwidth.

Benefits

Images get hotlinked a lot. But, although hotlinking may appear evil, in the case of images it does have certain benefits. If you watermark your images, each hotlink will also serve to promote your site/brand. In addition, as I said earlier, Google seems to take hotlinks into account while ranking images in the SERPs.

Risks

In some situation, however, hotlinking may have a DETRIMENTAL EFFECT on your site and image rankings. For example, if your image is big and gets hotlinked many times, this may lead to a major bandwidth leek, and you’d definitely not want that to happen.

Besides, when Google sees many hotlinks to one and the same image, it has to decide which one of them to represent in the search results. It may even consider a hotlink sitting on somebody else’s site more relevant than your original picture, if it finds that site’s content keyword-richer or more relevant than yours.

Another possible risk is that, if the safe search filter (meant to close off adult and some other content) is applied to some site that hotlinks to your picture, the same filter will get applied to your image as well.

That said, when deciding on your hotlinking policy, weigh all the pros and cons as applied to your site. (1) Check your access logs and see if hotlinks are taking up too much of your bandwidth. (2) Check your rankings and see if anybody else is outranking you for YOUR images in the SERPs. (3) Make sure no safe search filter is applied to your pics.

And, if none of the points I’ve just mentioned hold true for your site, you may as well allow hotlinking. Just make sure Google’s bot requests for images are not blocked as part of the collateral damage.

>Bonus tip – stand out of the crowd!

Ok, one thing I’d like to leave you with is my idea of how you can conduct some competition research (probably prior to your Image Search SEO campaign) in regards to images. Look up your main keywords on Google Images and see how you could make your images stand out. Consider the following example below:

An outstanding image means more clicks and (as many SEO’s believe) higher rankings in the Image SERPs.

Know some other Images SEO master tricks? Do share!

Google Image Search: How to SEO-Optimize Images to Get Higher Rankings is a post from: Technshare

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