Top 10 tips for Google Image Search SEO

The power of image search is often undermined. Most of the SEO research revolves around text search and a lot of material is available on the internet as well. However very few people have researched image search SEO. This article gives the top 10 tips on how to do SEO for image search. Note that I am not saying that the world is moving towards image searches. Still a handsome majority (more than handsome perhaps) does text searches. So the focus should always be SEO’ptimzing for text search. As a parallel activity you should also do image search SEO.

The reason I say image search is powerful as it will give you some low hanging fruits in increasing organic traffic to your website. Not a lot of people focus on image search SEO you will find lesser competition on getting to top results in image search. If you think image search SEO is ‘kind of similar’ to text search SEO, stop reading this article now; go to Google Image search and search for the term ‘yahoo’ there. You will be startled to see that not even a single link on first page is from yahoo. To contrast the search algorithm of text search, search for the same term ‘yahoo’ on google search and you will see expected results. Forget yahoo, even searching for the term ‘google’ in image search doesn’t return google as the first relevant link.

So this demonstrates the capabilities of image search. Since the text search SEO tips are totally different what do you need to do for image search SEO. Here are top 10 tips to do image search SEO:

1) Image file names: First and foremost is to have good and descriptive file names for your images. Most of the images from cameras come out in a alphanumeric format and they are not at all SEO friendly. Change image names to reflect the contents of the image (i.e. keywords that your image is targeting should be reflective in the image name). Be descriptive with the name. For e.g. if you have image of a sunrise you want to index, add peripheral data like sunrise-at-alpine-mountains.jpg instead of a simple sun.jpg or sunrise.jpg

2) Include a short two line description just below the image. The description should be indicative of what the image is all about (in other words what keywords your are targeting in image search).

3) Do not forget the all important HTML tags in the IMG tag. ALT attribute is a must. Remember search engines dont have eyes :), so give them all clues for your image. Equally important is the TITLE attribute. Use 7-8 good keywords in both the attributes. For example something like this is a good img tag:
img src=”/hyundai-i10-leather-interiors-beige.jpg” alt=”Hyundai i10 car with beige leather interiors” title=”Inside Hyundai i10 car with leather interiors in beige color” width=”600″ height=”400″

4) The image should be between relevant text. So if you have an image of a car, the contents just before and after the image should be talking about cars. Relevant content around the image is the key thing.

5) Try to wrap text around the image using style=float. Of course it should look natural on the page. If the image is large or the layout doesnt allow this, you have much more reasons to follow tip 4 i.e. wrap the image with the contextual text.

6) Empirical evidences are there that images on the top of the page (not header) are given more weightage in image search results.

7) Places where you are not allowed text descriptions (photo galleries etc.) should always follow tip 3 and additionally use the Title and Meta tags of the webpage to describe the image and target keywords for SEO.

 Description of the image should be in H3 or Bold tag to have more weightage.

9) Be aware of image hijacking by google search. Image hijacking is where you dont display the image on your webpage, but have the image url embedded somewhere. Google thinks that the image is from your webpage and returns your domain name for the image in search, even though you dont have the image on your server or never showed it on your webpage! Not sure if this is a bug or feature :).

10) Follow other SEO guidelines that you usually do. This list is over and above what you have been doing.

You will be surprised to see how image search gives you an alternate source of traffic without hindering your regular SEO efforts! So keep up the creative juices flowing. Let me know if you find additional tips on image search.