With the increase in the impact of visual trends, importance of images on a website and image search has drastically increased. Image search can be defined as query results that are accompanied by thumbnail graphics and supplanted by contextual information, that best match users' search queries.In this post, I have listed few points which will help you to optimize your images for Search Engines and rank them in the image search.
1. Places the images where image search results appear, and are indexable into general Search Engines' contextual results, including:
- Major Search Engines - either within contextual search results or vertical image search
- Photo sharing sites (Flickr, Webshots, PBase, Fotki)
- Social image sharing sites (MySpace, Facebook)
2. Take original photos, so that you can brand them with your trademark, logo or url. At business listing sites, add your business logo to creates a more significant effect on users’ mind.
3. Use good quality pictures and images, and make necessary resolution adjustments between full size images and thumbnails. Pictures with good contrast tend to work better.
4. Save your photos as JPG files, and other graphic images as GIFs.
5. Give appropriate file names to your images that match and represent the theme. Image names should be descriptive such as mobile-phone.jpg rather than untitled1.jpg.
6. Give appropriate alt tag and title tag to the images.
7. Use clear images as distorted images are not able to speak their agenda.
8. Images should be less weighted as heavy images increase page loading time and also use extra bandwidth.
9. Always specify the width and height of the images when you define an image on webpage. If you don’t mention the same then html parser itself need to consider the image size and it’ll take some extra time to think.
10. If content rich pages are embedded with pictures then they have more chances of ranking for those images and web pages. Such as if you’re providing services then add smiley faces of employees OR if you are selling products then include all products images on site. So add images on to content rich pages.
11. Add map image or link to map from site page. It increases your site usability.
12. On alt tag of map images, add physical address of your business.
13. You can also add testimonials from customers, celebrities’ snaps or award winning snapshots. This will create trust and attract more visitors.
14. Add your logo on press releases and link them to your home page.
15. While submitting your site to directories, add logo to your profile.
16. Upload images to Google Base.
17. Include images and logo into your newsletter (email marketing campaign) and get linked from them.
18. Get more links from clients, partners or B2B sites through images.
19. Use thumbnails (i.e. small size images) instead of large images and get the large images linked from those thumbnails. It will decrease the load time of your web page and also increase its usability.
20. Enable enhanced image search in Google webmaster tools in order to add valuable tag to your image in Google image Search Engine.
21. Link every image as hyperlinked images have much better chances of being included in image searches even if they are linking to themselves.
22. Bookmark your images using social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg etc.
23. Search Engines also look at the text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy so take care of the surrounding text and use related text near the images.
24. Do not exclude your graphic images directory from search robots or limit search engine access to graphic-image files.
Image Search Engines:-
http://www.live.com/?&scope=images
http://www.exalead.com/image/results?q=
http://www.altavista.com/image/
http://www.graphicsfactory.com/
http://www.animationfactory.com/en/
http://www.faganfinder.com/img/ (Specifies all search engines, Stock photographs, graphics and clip-art, photo sharing sites and artwork related images sites)
http://images.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.ask.com/?#subject:img|pg:1
http://www.fastimagesearch.com/
2 comments:
One of the best article on Image optimization but one thing is missing.
Go to google webmaster tools and activate the option "Enhanced image search" which you can find under tools category.
Google may use tools such as Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.
Nice idea and thanks for presenting to us.
everyone like your blog. Thanks for sharing.
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