9 Ways of Optimizing your Site for Image Search

1. Use descriptive file names

Make sure that the file name describes the image with keyword phrases searchers are likely to use.

Bad: www.yoursite.com/images/photo-356789.jpg
Good: www.yoursite.com/images/row-boat-by-lake.jpg
Good: www. yoursite/images/red-volkswagen-beetle-car.jpg

2. Use the HTML ALT tags actively

(If you do not know what that is, make sure you use the description field in your blog or content publishing software when adding an image).

Bad: <img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/6789stp.jpg” alt=”Image”>.

Good: <img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/young-woman-pc-reading-news.jpg” alt=”Young woman reading news on PC”>.

If you have a series of images, use variation:

“Blond woman reading news on PC”
“Black woman twittering on a Mac”
“Asian man with laptop on table”

Both photographers and webmasters are notoriously bad at using words for feelings, abstracts and the like — even if people do search for images that may be used to illustrate non-concrete topics. This is where you can gain a competitive advantage.

“Happy woman using PC to search the Web”
“Moody and cranky girl”
“Green background texture”

3. Add descriptive text close to the picture

In order to determine what the picture is depicting, the search engines will also look at the text close to the image.

Good: An increasing number of women are found to be searching the web on their PC when looking for news. <img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/young-woman-pc-reading-news.jpg” alt=”Young woman reading news on PC”>.

This text may also be used by the search engine as a snippet that describes the image.

4. Keep the most important images close to the top headline or title

Embedding the image close to the top headline (which should be very similar to the TITLE-field) will increase your chances of having your picture in Google News, as it helps Google match the content of the article with the image.

It is a fair guess that the same principle applies to Image Search.

5. Put the photos within articles and blog posts

The search engines have a tendency of ignoring images in sidebars and other places where they can be interpreted as ads or navigational elements.

Images in articles and blog posts have the greatest chance of success.

There are also other technical issues to keep in mind:

6. Do not add code to break out of frames

The Bing Blog recommends you to watch out for frame breaking:

“Sites that attempt to break frames make it more difficult for the image to display correctly within search. Make sure you’re testing your site against the search engines.”

If you don’t know what we are talking about, you are probably in the clear.

7. Use images that read well when thumbnailed

Use high quality pictures with high contrasts and clear, bright, colors. The search engines will generate small thumbnails to include in search engine results, and you want images that survive that reduction in file size.

If you are not a photographer yourself, you can buy royalt free high quality images from stock photo suppliers like Photos.com and Shutterstock for a reasonable price.

Google are looking for large size photos with good aspect ratios.

8. Make the photos accessible

Make sure that the directory that contains your images can be accessed by the search engine crawlers.

Check your robots.txt file or ask your IT people to do it for you.

9. Use the social photo sites

Upload some of your images to photo hosting sites like Flickr.com. Add links back to the relevant page on your site.

Flickr may generatate traffic on its own, and the search engines may also include Flickr images in their image search results.

Check how many pictures Google has indexed

To check what images Google has indexed from your site, use the following URL, replacing “yoursite.com” with your domain name:

http://images.google.com/images?q=site:yoursite.com

Note that it normally takes longer for the search engines to index pictures than ordinary text content.