It’s all about the image!
March 18, 2008
I have read an interesting blogspot by Ann Smarty today called Image SEO and it reminded me to an old blog post of mine regarding image optimization for Google.
One thing that you notice is that you do not NEED to have an alt tag or have the image named according to the keywords you are after. What is the most important thing when it comes to image optimization? Surrounding text!
Let’s just think about it: When you are searching for an image of an old friend, wouldn’t you agree that the most important thing is the text above and the text below the image?
I’m NOT saying Ann’s suggestions are not helpful, because they are, BUT there are many more effective things that you can do in order to come up for Google Images searches.
So let me give you an example right now:
I am Google Imaging Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World and what pops up is in this Digital Point thread where an image without any of the keyterms in the name or alt tag is number 7 out of 500k results. You can see the text surrounding it in my location and in my signature and that is doing the trick.
So please, before you do anything and cause yourself a ton of extra work, evaluate any advice with common sense. Google is smarter than most of us think.
This is my SEO Tip of the day and my name is Mike Dammann.
Google Image results can also give you a lot of quality traffic.
So use my advice, give it a try and then come back here to let us know about your results!
Added: And for those of you who might think that this is all about Digital Point’s authority, check number 20 and you will see the Fire Town image from Property Hogs which doesn’t have the keywords in the alt tag or name either.
Every once in a while I see a referring url from google image search. Just never thought about optimizing for it.
The quality of the traffic from images is usually way below that of real search traffic when it comes to converting them into $
I also wrote a post image and SEO and the only thing missing is a mention of the images size. I was at SES in New York and a Google imaging guy (RJ) said the the image size was very important and they will show the larger images first.
If you are interested you can read my post:
http://www.bigoakinc.com/blog/images-seo-traffic/
Mike,
I think you’re leaving out two very important factors at play here. And both of the factors apply to your Digital Point & Property Hogs examples.
The first factor is image size. Every image on your example images search is at least 250 pixels in width or height. If the picture on Digital Point forums had been 150×100 instead of 500×333, it wouldn’t have shown up in the search results. Most images I tend to see in results are 300×300 or larger.
The second factor is overall page theme. Even on the Digital Point forum post “Real Estate Agent” is the overall theme of the page. The OP’s name had “Agent” as part of his name, so that word is plastered all over the cached text of the post. Also, that exact phrase appears 4 times on the page, helping make it the dominant theme of the page as a whole. To illustrate this, just look at the Google AdSense ads that are displayed on the DP page. When I looked they were about Real Estate & Real Estate Agents. If that DP post had been in a very long thread about CMS & .NET & I doubt your image example would still show up.
I feel these other two factors are just as important in Google images results as the surrounding text.
That’s an interesting point Mike. Definitely something to keep in mind when using images
Thanks, Misha
I couldn’t help but notice that your content page here about search engine optimization hasn’t even been recognized by google…you don’t even have a 0 out of 10 ranking…you have a nothing out of 10.
Furthermore, your homepage doesn’t even have a google ranking. And yet you’re telling us something about seo? Am I missing something here?