SEO Your Images for Google Image Search

Google Image Search can be used as a great method of driving additional traffic to your site, but it must be treated differently to regular SEO methods to be most effective.

Images are extremely popular on social media and photographers love to use them to get exposure and get their images seen, as well as using them as a tool to aid Search Engine Optimisation. Social Media sites offer a few tools to help with this, namely, tagging. Whether it’s image tagging, geo-tagging, image titles or even the file name itself it is vital that you use these to get your keywords across so you can target the people you want to find your images.

The 2011 Brighton Pride Image Example

Look at the image to the left as an example. By searching on Google Images for ‘Brighton Pride 2011’ the photo is displayed on the first page of results out of thousands and thousands of other rival images. By using the creative commons license, photographer Heather Buckley, has made the image free to be published on other site as long as she gets a credit for the image. Often this credit will include a link, allowing her to drive traffic to her flicker account, which then allows people to see more of her work on her own blog. By making sure all her images on her blog are also properly tagged and titled it helps improve her image rankings on Google.

Also, by getting an image to rank well it also highly improves the chances of other bloggers finding and reusing the image in their own content, giving you more links to your own site.

Getting Blog Images to Rank

While Social Media sites are great to get your images to rank your blog is also a grand resource to enhance this as well. This is why we’ve put together some top tips for optimising your blog images, so you can start climbing the Image Search rankings and find a new source of traffic.

Just bare in mind that Google’s Image search bot crawls at a slower rate than the regular Google search bot, so effects are not necessarily immediate. However, this is no reason not to make these tips future habits for treating your images.

One of the main things the Google bot looks at is the text associate with the image. Here are some of the things to look out for:

Filename: make it clear what the image is and don’t leave the default camera file name in. Make sure it is short and descriptive, using dashes between words.
Alt and Title tags: similar rule to the filename but without the need to use dashes. Ensure that the title and filename are similar, while use the Alt tag with relevant keywords. Keeping the alt tag and image name the same can be a winning option.
Caption: make sure you add a short, simple description of the image.
Surrounding Text: The bot will look at text around the image for context, so make sure your content relates to the image.

For naming and tagging your images, imagine that Google is a blind person; how would you describe the image to that person. Expand on the description in the text surrounding the image.

Other things to keep in mind to attract users to your images in the Google Image search results are:

Image size: higher quality the better! Images can always be scaled down but can’t be up scaled.
Image quality: make sure the quality of you images is high. Use good equipment and photo editing software to get the most out of your snaps.
Related images: make sure your images relate to your content otherwise search engines are less likely to send users to your site as the page would lack consistency. Plus if they do, users are less likely to stay on the site as the content won’t match what they are looking for.

Use these tips and watch your images climb Google’s Image Search rankings, build valuable links and drive new traffic to your site.

About the guest author: Based in the lovely city of Brighton, Silicon Beach Training offers a wide range of courses that will teach you how to hold your own against the online heavyweights. Make sure that your content is found with full and comprehensive SEO Training Courses, as well as tracking and improving your increased traffic through going on a Google Analytics Training Course.

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