You are already optimizing your site for search engines, right? But I bet you aren’t optimizing your images for search traffic!
I know, Google image search only gets a half a percent of Google’s overall traffic. But due to blend search results, images actually get a lot more traffic than that half a percent.
Unlike before, when you now search for terms like “golden gate bridge” you actually see images of the golden gate bridge on the search listings page. For this reason, it’s important to optimize your images for search engines.
Here’s how you can make your images search engine friendly:
Alt tags
Because search engines can’t read images, you need to use alt tags to help describe your image.
If you have one on the Golden Gate Bridge during a foggy day, your alt tag should be something like this:
Alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog”
Here is how the full image code should look like:
<img src=”http://www.quicksprout.com/foggygoldengatebridge.jpg” alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog” Â />
The key to creating good alt tags are:
- Describe the image, don’t just stuff in keywords.
- It should be keyword rich.
- It needs to be short and to the point.
Long descriptions
Similar to an alt tag, there is also a longdesc attribute. It was first created to help the visually impaired understand images. If you happen to have an image of the Golden Gate Bridge on a foggy day, there is a lot more words that can be used to describe it than the alt tag we used in the above example.
From the color, to the height of the bridge to how the fog looks, there are a lot of elements to the picture. So to describe the image you may include text on a page that explains in full detail what the image is all about.
In this scenario you would use a longdesc and within it would be the URL that explains the image in details.
<img src=”http://www.quicksprout.com/foggygoldengatebridge.jpg” alt=”Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog” longdesc=”http://www.quicksprout.com/imageseo.html” />
File name
Using the same Golden Gate Bridge example, you want your image file name to be descriptive of what the image is about. And because there are billions of images out there, you don’t want to use a generic image file name like “goldengatebridge.jpg”.
Instead you want to use something a bit more descriptive, such as “foggygoldengatebridge.jpg”. That image file name does a much better job at describing the image than using a generic name that will be tough to compete for in the rankings.
File size
There are 2 aspects to an images file size. The first is the dimensions of the image and the second is how much storage space the image requires.
When optimizing an image, you ideally want the dimensions to be as big as possible, yet you want the storage space to be as small as possible. Through programs like Skitch, you can adjust the dimensions, while keeping the storage size small through compression.
Best of all, programs like Skitch will help maintain the quality of the image as you don’t want to compress them so much that the image doesn’t look good anymore.
EXIF data
EXIF stands for exchangeable image file format, which allows you to add various types of meta data to the actual image file. In other words, it will be embedded to the image itself, so wherever it goes, the meta data goes with it.
EXIF data is even a more detailed than the alt tag and long description. It caries data such as:
- Was the flash on or off when the picture was taken.
- What type of camera was the image taken with.
- The aperture speed that was used.
- Date and time the picture was taken.
- The image height and width.
The EXIF data also covers another 20 or 30 facts about the image, but I won’t bore you with them. What you need to do is consider modifying it and adding a detailed description of your image along with your website name.
Rich snippets
Unlike the other image optimization tips, this one tags an image to your website or business. That way if you have 1 image that is highly related to your business, it will show up when someone Google’s your business.
For example, when you Google “Neil Patel” you’ll see a picture of me tied to the Quick Sprout listing. This is very useful because it will increase your click through rate.
You can read this article by Google to get a better understanding of how to implement it and you can use this tool to test if you implemented it right.
Anchor text
Just like ranking a web page, you can increase your image rankings by building links to it. And the richer the link anchor text, the higher the image will typically rank.
So if I want to rank that image of the Golden Gate Bridge for “Golden Gate Bridge”, I would build links with the anchor text “Golden Gate Bridge”. And just like normal link building you also want to rotate up the anchor text as having too rich anchor text can hurt your rankings.
If you want to build links to your images, check out the following link building articles:
- Finally: An Easy-to-Understand Link Building Plan to Help You Recover from Penguin and Panda
- 7 Link Building Mistakes You Ought to Avoid
- 10 Hard-Hitting Link Building Tactics That’ll Boost Your Rankings
- How to Leverage Link Blending and Stage 2 Link Building to Maximize Your Rankings
Content
When you place an image on your website, make sure you wrap content around it. From the text underneath or above the image, the title tag of the page, and even headings, the more the text is related to the image the better off you are.
Don’t spam everything with keywords, but sprinkle them in when it makes sense.
GEO locations
Last, but not least, if you are looking to rank your images for localized keywords, make sure you do all of the things above, but add local keywords to everything.
For example if your business is located in the San Francisco region, you could have called that Golden Gate Bridge image file:
sanfranciscogoldengatebridge.jpg
And for the alt tag, you could have used “San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog” instead of “Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog”.
Conclusion
If you are already optimizing your images for image search, you probably are doing so through alt tags and image file names. But you probably aren’t using the advance tactics such as using GEO location, rich snippets, or even modifying EXIF data.
A lot of those tactics won’t have a huge impact on your image rankings, but if you combine all of them you should see an increase in rankings.
What other ways can you optimize your images?
This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.
Great article Neil!
Should all of the above be used together and all the time or this would be overdoing it? Is there a possibility of over optimizing if you use all of the above?
Yes Of Course We Can Use All, But You Have To Give Time.
Yep, exactly.
That’s also my concern – running the risk of over optimization if you stuff all your images with alt tags and keywords. But I don’t think that’s the effect if you follow these tips. The tips above aren’t overkill because they cover all the aspects of optimizing your images. Covering these factors means maximizing the potential of images in seo.
Ideally you should use it all the time, but it is too time consuming to do so.
That particular plugin crashes WordPress and has lots of issues, so I would avoid installing that plugin.http://www.way2photo.com/
Besides Skitch there are also Smush.it and PunyPng.com. that are great for reducing file size while keeping the same resolution and quality.
There is also a WordPress plugin (free) for Smush.it that processes all images as you upload them to your blog.
Kris,
That particular plugin crashes WordPress and has lots of issues, so I would avoid installing that plugin.
Jonathan,
I’ve never had any issues with the plugin. I am using it on a couple of my blogs and it is working as it is supposed to.
I guess it depends on what theme you use it and what other plugins you have installed.
Let us know if you ever experience problems.
I appreciate the feedback Jonathan.
Thanks for sharing Kris, I will check them out.
I think you touch on something that a lot of people miss out on Neil. Images tend to be one of my biggest traffic producers. A well optimized image can help bring new traffic, readers, and customers. People love images/photos/etc the clearer and bigger the better. But make sure it doesn’t slow the site speed down. Never heard of Skitch before but seems like it could make life a lot easier when dealing with images.
You should check it out, let me know what you think when you do.
It’s amazing to know that one item that is ignored by most is one of the most important factors that helps in search engine rankings.
Every little component makes for a complete optimized website and am sure images contribute as much. It’s great to know and will surely implement this on my blog as well. Hope to see some great results there, among other areas which I’m already working on based on your other blog posts.
Kudos to another great post!
Sounds good, if you have any questions as you go let me know.
This is the first time I’m reading something like long descriptions. Truly I’ve never heard them before Neil..
There’s so much depth in the post, though it seems to be short! Thanks for the insightful post Neil
Great, always happy to have my readers learn something new and helpful when they come here!
Optimizing for images is the most under-utilized form of SEO I see. I constantly see SEO’s forgetting this. It makes a huge difference in and rankings.
Thanks for sharing.
Yep, it really can. Glad you see the value in them.
Good post – all good tips. Here is another:
Google allows you to create image sitemaps now.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636
Its very similar to a standard site map, but its purely for images. It allows you to add captions, titles and geo location via simple xml markup.
Just generate a sitemap according to specs, and upload that sucker to your webmaster tools account.
This is especially helpful if you have images buried in javascript.
I didn’t know about Sitemap for Images
Great resource
Glad you found it helpful.
Awesome, thanks for sharing with everyone Justin. I appreciate it.
Optimizing the images ( I mean decreasing its size ) can also be a good idea. You can use free tool like File-Minimizer Picture 3.0.
Now another problem which occur is, you might be getting visitors to your images ( from google images ) but they aren’t generating any revenue. In such case you can use a wordpress plugin : wordpress.org/extend/plugins/break-out-of-frames/ This plugin will redirect the visitor to your webpage.
Here’s one of my post published long ago : http://blogvkp.com/image-seo-tips-for-better-ranking/
Thanks Vivek, for all your additional tips.
I thought that the alt tag was for visually impaired visitors. I am unclear about the longdesc tag.
It is, but it also helps with search rankings.
Hi Neil,
Perfect timing on this great article. 2 quick questions:
1. Do you recommend following or no following the source for image credit?
2. If you’ve turned the image more into a graphic, should the description instead contain something similar to your article meta description?
Thanks,
You should follow it if you got it from somewhere.
Yes, it should be more similar to an article meta description.
Thanks!
No problem, happy to help.
Great post,
anyone knows if the ‘longdesc’ attribute is the same as ‘Description’ on WordPress tool to insert images? I typically fill that text with a little more extended text than the alt tag, but didn’t know I could paste a URL in there.
Good question. I actually don’t know the answer to this.
Hi Neil,
Very informative post. Keep up the great posts!
Thanks Gina, glad you liked it.
Wow! That was excellent article about Image optimization.
I have a question:
How Google will come to know, which is original image and which is copied image?
Thanks.
They determine it by a lot of things such as date/time and how many links point to each image, etc.
Google won’t know if you change the file name and the alt description.
Great Article Niel,
But I have two main things regarding this post,
1. Do e-commerce can take advantage from the visitor landing via Image search? I think optimization of image mainly help in blog purposes or very particular niche..
2. While searching for ‘Neil Patel’ on image search, we only get One Quicksprout link.. Do you think your blog should have alt text?
Yea it benefits publishing sites more than ecommerce, but ecommerce can use image seo as well.
You should use alt text. I use it for Quick Sprout.
The problem with e-commerce is the ever/fast change of product images. It gets very time consuming.
Think of renaiming the image file before you uplooad it to the site and ad an alt tag is allready going far more than what most e-commerce sites do.
Thank you for your additional input Steven.
Yeah! thanks for the input..
I recently check for my clients niche, and will surely improving this
Awesome, best of luck.
Image optimization is such a foundational SEO tactic that always seems to be helping my sites. It’s almost offensive how many people forget alt tags and don’t optimize their image names.
Image size is a whole other story. Using Photoshop or Fireworks, it’s easy enough to drop the image size from 250kb to 25kb with little or no noticeable visual difference.
I’m not familiar with the long description though. Have you found that to be an additional ranking factor for images?
It “supposedly” helps, but I don’t have data to back it up.
Great post, and often something that’s overlooked! My niche is real estate, all to often I see agents write about a new property listing an upload images with no alt tags and poor file names.
Taking the time to do something as simple as editing those things, can make a HUGE difference in search!
Thanks Ricardo, you are correct the simplest things can make biggest difference.
Hi Neil,
Well i always thought that to display an images with the listing was simply done using the “link rel=author” tag.
I really did not understand what you meant “1 image that is highly related to your business, it will show up when someone Google’s your business.” ?
Will Rich Snippet if coded properly even display differnt images for differnt inner pages ?
Please advise
It just picks 1 image, even for internal pages from my understanding.
Nice tips for image optimization. Definitely i will follow these tips form next post. Thanks for share.
Thanks, let me know how they work out for you.
Neil,
Any thoughts on how to optimize infographics since you guys do that lot in your kissmetrics site?
Please share
Chris
Here is a post I wrote about infographics. Check it out, it should give you some useful tips.
5 Ways to Get Your Infographic to Go Viral
http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/06/11/5-ways-to-get-your-infographic-to-go-viral/
Neil.. That is so kind of you to reply in between your busy schedule.
Thanks Chris, I hope those tips help. Let me know if you have any more questions.
Interesting about EXIF data. Do we know if Google reads this and use it for ranking? EXIF data contains much more than the items described in the article. You can list name, keywords, and even an URL to the photographer. Adobe Bridge is excellent to use for entering/changing the EXIF data for any image.
Most people say they don’t. A few say they do…
I am not 100% sure.
Great post with a lot more in-depth ideas on image SEO than just the standard image name, alt & title fields. There are so many people who don’t even use the basics.
@Manu, the Description field in WordPress doesn’t generate any html code on your page when you insert an image into a post, so it’s not the same as the longdesc tag. Like others here I am not familiar with using longdesc, but according to Neil’s explanation, you would need to actually create a new page on your site with this extended description, then link to it in the tag. I think the WP Description field really only comes into use with a gallery.
Thank you Kristin for your response, I appreciate you helping out.
Is there any relation between the google Author rank and images ? When not is there a small trick to connect images to your google author rank ?
What is the difference between title and alt ?
Hi Jan,
If you have a google+ profile and you have a WordPress site, one “small trick” is to use Yoast WordPress SEO for rel=author.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Pretty easy to set up.
Lisa did a good job of answering your first question.
As for the second one… check out this post: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/image-alt-text-vs-image-title-whats-the-difference/6930/
As @Justin mentioned, image sitemaps are a way to get additional consideration by the search engines and improve the experience for users. Building this now will increase the likelihood your images will return in the search results.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178636
Here’s another useful tip for optimizing how image files are named in regard to ranking better in image / overall search results:
To make the file name of the image more readable by the user who is scanning over search (AND, I would speculate, but the Google bot as well that indexes your sites), put “_” between words in the file name.
For example, “foggygoldengatebridge.jpg” would become “foggy_golden_gate_bridge.jpg”
Nice tip, thanks for providing an example Matt.
An often overlooked channel to receive relevant traffic. Especially in some niches optimizing for images can be huge! Great as always Neil!
Thanks Benny, I am happy you enjoyed it.
Hi Neil
honestly you really lecture me on something l don’t know much about,l have to bookmark this post for to mater it properly.Thanks
Great, always good to hear my readers have learned something new from here. Let me know if you have any questions.
That’s a TERRIFIC post! THANK YOU, Neil!
From personal experience, I have actually noticed in the last couple months just how many websites I visited precisely because of the images in Google Images that showed up when I was searching for some things. There is now probably a dozen websites that I discovered because of the images and that I now check regularly. I also bought several things. And all discovered through those Google Images. Even just today, before I read Neil’s post: I googled for “raw persimmon pie” (now that we are in persimmon season) – and all these persimmon pie images show up and I ended up on several recipe websites, all because of the images.
Now having read Neil’s post, I can also tell that some image-heavy websites and blogs (that I check) certainly look like they don’t optimize their images for SEO and miss on lots of opportunities. They should start reading QuickSprout!
Neil: I wish though you included in your post a section on image SEO specifically in WordPress, since so many of us use WordPress.
Thanks for the feedback Olga, I appreciate it.
Great Article. Mr. Neil. Indeed images on any site is a big deal. Making it optimized is surely an important part of the campaign. Good point of view.
Thanks, I am glad you agree.
Hi neil,
It’s my first time I’ve been on your site. What a great post to start with! One question on the subject of geolocation.
This is obviously valuable for local marketing, particularly for Google+ Places pages. I’ve seen a suggestion that it can be a good idea to upload and optimse a photo in Google’s Panoramio, adding the cordinates that the photo was taken at, then pulling that photo down to your website. If you’re in business in a particular location, then photos geolocated to spots withing the area should be a plus for SEO.
Your advice would be appreciated.
Hey John, it definitely is worth doing that.
Neil,
Should we worry about over-optimization, as google seems to be cracking down on this. When they see keywords everywhere it draws a red flag with google, or so I thought.
Mike
Not with images. As long as you don’t keyword stuff you should be fine.
Hi Neil, I wanted to suggest my online image SEO tool which looks at the images of a webpage and offers suggestions…
Image tool
Cool, I will check it out.
He Neil,
Thats the lovely post you have written!!! I always read about SEO . But this is first time I came to know so much things about images especially EXIF data & longdesc attribute.
I always focus on alt text but after reading this I have to check all images on my website.
Sounds good, I hope these tips work out for you.
Hi Neil,
To be frank,I didn’t know about longdesc image tag before reading this post and the great tools you mentioned!Thanks for sharing this great image optimization guide with us
Happy to share, good to hear you found it useful.
Please cite a source for *each one of these suggestions* confirming that search engines (though everyone just says “Google”) do in fact use these. And not just the alt ATTRIBUTE (they’re not tags) thing… that’s years old. What about the others? Sources please.
Tom, that would be too hard as it is all from my experiences over the years tied in with a bit of research and some feedback from other seos.
Sorry
Alt tags I found helped me a whole lot with image rankings. There are other ways for Google to work out what the image is about, and frequently the content surrounding it makes all the difference, but alt tags do the initial work. You should never forget about those.
Yep, having valuable content is always better.
This was a great post and something thats been on my radar the past few months after having quite a bit of success with image optimisation especially around social craze memes.
Also geo-tagging images for local search is a huge to-do for many local businesses who want to rank higher in Google Local listings.
Well done on highlighting these keys to your fan base Neil!
Thank you, glad you have found it helpful.
I stopped reading after you said “alt tags”… it’s an attribute not a tag. article fails right there.
Sorry about that Chuck. I guess we all make mistakes as we are human.
Bit harsh Chuck considering it’s commonly referred to as the Alt tag in the SEO world. Although not technically right, I’m pretty sure everybody who read this post understood what Neil was on about. The same can be said for the “Title Element” which is the correct terminology but I bet my bottom dollar that the majority of people call it the “Title Tag” – even SEOmoz refer to it as the title tag! But hey, who are SEOmoz?
GEO locations and Exif will really work i you take it together
I liked your image optimization tricks…
thanks
Great, thanks for letting me know.
Hi Neil,
Another information post. I really like reading your blog. I have been a regular reader of your blog but never thought of commenting. But from now, I will be doing it regularly.
Thanks Again.
Awesome, thanks for reading and feel free to comment as often as you like!
Nice Article,
Concerning the EXIF data… wouldn’t some of the image compression strategies strip that information to reduce the file size? If so, should a person optimize for file size or information within the file?
Optimize for file size over information within the EXIF data.
Thanks for this list Neil! A lot of work goes into setting up and maintaining sites, so it is greatly appreciated anytime we can find ways to get the most out of our efforts.
Looking forward to reading more of your posts.
No problem Stephen, looking forward to having you come back and read them.
Hi Nick.
Good advise and I like the link to Stitch its what ive been looking for for ages! I try and get my keyword for each page into an image Alt tage along with a brief description. Stuff to many keywords in and Google will notice
Good, I am glad you found what you were looking for.
Another one of Neil’s great article always have something new to teach us
I’ll try to post more optimized images on my blog from now on .. 
Thank you Renee for the kind words.
Thank you Neil, you’ve discovered a new world for me.
I was standing on ALT tag, but i never heard about other optimizations that you’ve explained
Happy to share Giulia, hope it helped.
Hey Neil,
I’ve been reading your blog for ages. Some great tips in here
Thanks for the good work!
Awesome! I appreciate your support.
google spider can’t identification what’s going on in picture,If your picture is not having Alt Released published written text then Look for Motor Examine will neglect that picture and it will cause damage to blog page SEO.Alt Released published written text is the conditions that google uses to understand pictures.
Thanks for the added input, I am sure others will find it helpful.
Hopefully, the webteam behind the new instagram pages will read this article.
Lol maybe they will.
Really good post Neil! I was aware of alt tags, titles and anchor texts but you really taught me a lot here. I had no idea about EXIF and how to optimize it and I will definitely be looking into this. Using rich snippets was also new to me so i’ll be looking into that as well. Thanks a bunch Neil!
Great, glad to hear it helped. Let me know if you have any questions as you go.
Great post Neil. While I’m aware of some, the rich snippet and exif data are something new to me. Thanks for the share.
Thanks RJ,
Glad to hear you learned something new here.
That particular plugin crashes WordPress and has lots of issues, so I would avoid installing that plugin. Check way2photo.com
Thanks for the heads up.
Hi Neil Patel ! Thank you for your grat guidence. I’m a blog writer, so that is really usefull for me. I did not take care about image but today this article reveals that the fact ideas. It will really helfull to boost up Google PageRank.
Cool, I hope these tips are helpful to you.
Amazing tips neil , i was just knowing about Alt tags .
Thanks Shubham, glad to know you have picked up some new information here.
I had no idea that adding alt text to my images can help with my search rankings, this proves that you really do learn something new every day!
You definitely can, I know I do!
It’s interesting how we can make use of our image to promote our site. I know it works because we’ve tested it. And there’s Pinterest…
Great, happy to hear it has been working for you.
i will surly try this atl system for my blog , it seems great way!!!
Awesome, let me know how it works out for you.
Several of the replies are concerning the long description, and how it looks in the code. Here is an example, and I hope it helps somebody.
I’ve been using these alts and longdesc for years, and we’re consistently on Google’s page one in our niche. Don’t know if this bit of coding helps, but it sure as heck doesn’t hurt.
Good luck, all.
How odd. The example was dumped by this blog. Never saw that before. Trying again, omitting the brackets.
img border=”0″ src=”images/carpet_cleaning_landing.jpg” width=”309″ height=”151″ alt=”Cleaner, longer-lasting carpet starts here” longdesc=”Call Reliable for cleaner, longer-lasting carpets”
Cheers
Thanks for sharing I appreciate you helping out.
Thank you for this article.
The “longdesc” attribute is not used by Google to my knowledge.
Have you done a test on this?
I haven’t. A few other SEOs told me it has worked for them and others have told me it doesn’t do anything.
I never really understood how to optimise images but now I do
thanks Neil
Happy to hear it.
optimising images is something I have yet to do, I never really understood the importance of them. I used them to add weight to my posts and make them look more appealing and tutorial like but as for SEO puposes I think that is something I should start doing more of from today.
Great post Neil
Regards
SI
Definitely do give it a try, there are many benefits!
Would you pls advise what is the correct procedure of writing image filename? Previously I heard to use hyphen between words like “golden-gate-bridge.jpg” but you haven’t mentioned any hyphen or underscore in between. Is it necessary?
You can do either or. Dashes versus no spaces makes no difference. Search engines are smart enough these days to figure that out.
Thanks Neil for your opinion.
No problem, hope it helps.
Hi Neil, couldn’t help myself to write you again! Thanks for your Skitch software info. It’s really really cool and user-friendly. Thanks.
Thanks, always glad to have my readers share there thoughts.
I know image phrases are a great idea. m y question is, if you are using the Post Picture as the cause image in Thesis, so it reveals effectively at the top of your website and as a thumbnail, how do you get it to demonstrate a caption?
Not sure sadly… I am not that technical.
Long Description.. This is the new thing I have found here. Will must implement for me. Thanks for the post.
Definitely do, let me know how it works out for you.
Thanks for sharing the tips on how to optimize images for search engines. Very informative Post.
Bookmarked!
No problem Anderson, happy to help.
i was not knowing about the Alt tags and i will be suing this from next time.Thanks
Sounds good, let me know if you have any questions as you go.
Yeah! Long Description is somewhat new to me!
Great, hope it helps.
Yes I totally agree with this blog, use Alt attribute to optimize your images in SEO, Google crawler can’t optimize the image so that it will optimize the image by Atl Attribute.
Thanks
Thanks Rahul, glad you agree.
That’s really a cool piece of information. I was myself looking for image optimization a few weeks ago. And here’s what i got.
Thanks for sharing this information.
Cool, I am glad you found what you were looking for here.
The importance of image file size cannot be emphasised enough. In spite of this, I come across blog posts daily with multiple images where each image is 100′s of KB in size. Since it is common for posts to have multiple images, one can just imagine the total impact on page size.
Definitely, to many or to large of images will slow down you sites page load speed which will be bad for your SEO.
with paid traffic becoming more expensive and competitive, images have become a cheap way of getting free traffic. Thanks for the advice Neil
Definitely, as price and competition increase it is important to look for alternative ways. It is all about being creative and trying new things.
May be the file name “foggy-golden-gate-bridge.jpg†will be better?
You can use dashes as well. Not using them versus using them doesn’t really make a difference.
Neil, thanks for the great advice. I knew that images were important for SEO but never considered adjusting filenames, EXIF and rich snippets. I will now go back and update all of my images. Also, is there an ideal filesize? – Alex
Anywhere from 60-90k. However 90k can take longer to load.
Hi Neil,
Till yet I have optimized images only through alt tags & file name. But the tips that you shared for optimizing images specially long description, EXIF data, & Rich snippets are completely new for me. I’ll definitely use this from now onwards. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful blog with us.
Awesome, let me know how these tips work out fou you!
Adding the title tags and alt tags really help. the picture source file name should be the name including our keywords as well.. and after all its important not to enter text in an image.. cuz we know that search engine crawlers cant crawl through images..
Yep, you are correct.
If you continue to wish to transfer larger size photos, flip them into a destination page if somebody clicks on your smaller fingernail pictures.
Good tip, thanks for sharing.
One more important point, are the “imagesâ€, that people forget most of the time and do not optimize it. Optimized images will help you to get more traffic on to your website. I really loved this article, especially the explanation on EXIF and longdesc attribute, will surely apply it henceforth.
Yes, it is important to optimize your images.
hey neil,
it is a great article indeed. i really liked the information about Alt tags and EXIF. very nice post.
thanks for such informative post.
Thanks Matt, glad you liked it.
Nice post. This is really awesome and thorough information about image SEO. The image that shows up in the SERP is the authorship rich snippet. Google does not just pick an image that’s associated with the website. It takes the profile photo of the author. As far as I know, Google knows who the author is by linking the page to a Google plus profile usually with the “contributor to” section of the plus profile and a rel author link on the webpage.
Thank you Scott, I appreciate your added input.
So blessed to have found this page, I’m a photographer and I’ve been doing a horrible job at this. I thank you for opening why eyes to how important this is Neil, thank you thank you thank you!!!!
Actually, you don’t say something new. All the things are mentioned many many times on the net. I am waiting something new from you as the internet entrepreneur. Thank you.
I have a quick question Neil…
Do you know if Skitch is any better than Pixlr at compressing images while keeping them looking sharp?
I use Pixlr right now and it’s brain dead three-click simple process to navigate and accomplish the compression task but I love Evernote so I’m wondering if you’ve found one to be better than the other.
I use Image Tools for convert/optimize images. Iwrote this software by myself and its free. You can found it here: http://union-d.ru/projects/imagetools
It also can be used as PNG to JPEG converter. This is also reduce size of an images significantly.
We are a gaggle of volunteers and opening a brand new scheme in our
community. Your website offered us with helpful info to work on.
You’ve performed a formidable process and our entire group will be grateful to you.
optimizing images with alt tag is also help in creating image sitemap, is there any tools are there for generating image sitemap.
Hello!,,,,,,
Hi!,,,,,,Great post with a lot more in-depth ideas on image SEO than just the standard image name, alt & title fields. There are so many people who don’t even use the basics. Thank you so much!,,,,,,,
Great idea.. I will start using it in my website.. Is there any time frame that I need to wait to see the result ?
Thanks,
Glad I found this info.
The snippets lead me to the whole google authorship and the importance of setting it up.
So the EXIF data covers camera data. Correct me if I am wrong but the modifying the description and other info you wrote about is covered in the IPTC are of the information. The software for the website I am stumbling through has a EXIF section and IPTC section. Adobe Bridge also does the same thing where the description and headline as well as other information is done in the IPTC section of the metadata. Do Search engines consider the IPTC along with the EXIF?
That is a question I would need to think over and get back to you on. Great question!
I agree, we should not ignore optimizing our images. In my blog, I usually use original images. That is why I invest some time to also optimize the image attached to my post. If we spend time on writing contents, we should do it in our images.Generally, it is not advisable to add too many images in a website, but when images are absolutely necessary, there arises the need for image optimization and of course the author has shared some good points related to image optimization.
Paul, optimizing pages is essential. Great additional points you bring up as well
that was helpful
Anas, Thanks!
Thanks! I knew I needed to do something but you spelled it out perfectly…now back to work.
~Rachelle
Glad I could help
very nice post thanks , customized my images as u mentioned
Pawan, nice first step
Image optimization is also important as it drives good traffic to your blog….
Definitely!
Nice article Neil!
So you have any opinions/thoughts on how to optimize images for SEO & Pinterest at the same time?
Optimizing for Pinterest seems to be taking over the needs of Google and the visually impaired with the ALT tag. And I don’t think that’s fair. Your example of:
Alt=â€Golden Gate Bridge covered by fog”
.. probably wouldn’t make for a good “default” Pinterest pin description if someone wanted to pin this image and link to your post here (Pinterest pulls the ALT tag info for the default description). And I know we can’t always rely on Pinterest users to think of great catchy promotional descriptions to change the default ALT tags to.
Do you have any thoughts Neil?
I don’t sadly. But you make some good points and it is important to figure out how to make your images do well on Pinterest as well as they are dominating Google right now.
I have been reading about image optimization online, and this is by the far the top resource online. Thanks for the great information.
Glad you find it helpful