SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images
March 26th, 2008
We've been properly labelling and tagging our images for years. Some of our websites get most of their visitors from Google Images.
Google Images is the greatest SEO reserve left in the world. Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts let the cat out of the bag in 2006 and told the whole world about optimising for Google images. But it's hard work optimising images for Google Images and most webmasters still can't be bothered. There's still gold - or at least visitors - in those hills.
As Chris didn't cover the technical details in-depth, here's a step by step guide for optimising your images for Google images.
Most websites publish their images like this:
<img src="/images/192a/986943.jpg" alt="image">Where's the problem? Missing height and width, meaningless directory name, meaningless file name, generic alt tag.
Here's what a properly formatted image should look like:
<img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" width="400" height="340" />For bonus points link that image to a larger version of the same properly labelled image:
<a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a>For extra bonus points put that image in a h5 tag with a proper caption, close to if not identical to the alt tag:
<h5><a href="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-big.jpg" rel="lightbox"><img src="http://foliovision.com/images/2007/08/zen-fanless-power-supply-400.jpg" alt="Zen Fanless Power Supply" /></a><br />Fortron PFC ZEN fanless power supply</h5>If all that sounds like a huge hassle - when you do it for every image - you are absolutely right. It is a huge hassle to optimize for Google images by hand.
Which is why we built the SEO Images (part of Foliopress WYSIWYG) plugin.
With SEO Images, all of the above is happens automatically.
You only need to give the image the correct name (words separated by hyphens) and upload to the correct directory.
Automatically all the rest is added to your image:
- alt tag
- thumbnail (whatever size you prefer)
- link to larger version image
- caption
- width and height
- lightbox
If you want a lot of visitors from Google Images, you only need to use SEO Images for a few months and you will have the rankings and the visitors to go with them.
Here are the Google Images result for our example from above, the Zen Power Supply. Of 107,000 images, spots one and two are from Foliovision.com. The large and the small version of that image.
SEO Images Google Images results
Why a few months? Historically indexing in Google Images is much slower than for the rest of Google.
Chris and Stephen, in the future, please keep our secrets to yourselves!
Also check out Problogger Formatting images for SEO.
By Alec
Tags: seo, wordpress, WordPress images
10 comments on “SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images”
01
[…] seo de imagenes para google Guía paso a paso para la optimización seo de imágenes para Google imágenes. Viendo las indicaciones que nos muestran, para optimizar cada imagen hay que hacerlo a mano y […]
02
El optimizar imágenes contribuye a las busquedas universales, sin embargo habría que conocer la relevancia sobre los objetivos de un Sitio Web, ya que no a todos esto puede ayudarlos.
03
What about stuffing keywords into filenames for site graphics? Is this advised, or just plain moronic?
04
There would be a small short term benefit to using non-image related but post related keywords. But I recommend using images related to your post.
I don’t think stuffing keywords is the way to go long term. A properly labelled image will help. People will be happy to find it and click through to your page.
Images with names that have nothing to do with content could even open you up for penalties. You won’t get the external links you want and people won’t be happy to see your image in their results.
05
Great points. I watched Matt Cutts on a video about this and he explained to keep it simple and to the point describing your item in the image.
06
Bien, Bien. Pero que pasa si no uso miniatura, y solo les pongo el nombre separado por guiones si es que son mas de dos palabras. Bastara solo con eso???
07
What’s the deal with “rel=lightbox”? As far as I’m aware that’s for tagging image links for Lightbox scripts… but you seem to be saying to put it in no matter what because it helps with SEO? Or are you just assuming that everyone will be using Lightbox anyway? Please clarify.
08
Hello George,
For the moment the image title for hyphenated names will have to be tweaked by hand if you want to keep the hyphen. In our own work, we’ve found this to be a very small percentage of the images. Our system gets you very close but if you have accented characters for example, they have to be added after the fact (limits of web URLs to ASCII letters and numbers).
Hello Pigeon,
We are assuming that everyone will be using Lightbox (or Slimbox as we do). If you are not using Lightbox, that rel=”lightbox” does no harm in any case. If you are not using Lightbox then don’t use rel=”lightbox”.
09
Thanks alec, I see what’s going on now.
10
Great ideas. Is it not a problem, if I use -(hyphen) for the file name?
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