Helping Google find your website – best practices for images

In our last blog you learned how to optimise your website’s design and content to make it easier for Google to find, index and rank your site.

In this blog, we will look more specifically at images, and how to get your website’s images showing up in Google Images searches.

You can also check out a YouTube video about Google Image Search with lots of useful tips.
1. Don’t include text inside images. Search engines are unable to read text that is within images, instead include ‘alt’ text in the image’s HTML code. This text can be read by Google and other search engines.

2. Give images context. Whenever you have an image in your website, include relevant text near it describing the content of the image and why it is there. A simple, informative caption is a good idea. This also makes the images for meaningful for your website visitors.

3. Re-name your images to have detailed, informative file names. The default setting for photos taken with digital cameras is to name them with a meaningless string of letters and numbers e.g. DSC0065. Re-name photos, and any other images, with meaningful names, e.g. red-womens-cotton-shirt.jpg to give Google clues about what is in the image.

4. Use informative and user-friendly ‘alt’ text. We talked about this in our previous blog post, and you can watch a YouTube video with more information. The ‘alt’ attribute in your website’s HTML gives Google useful information about the image and allows your image to be ‘seen’ by people with visual impairments using screen-reading software.

5. Don’t be tempted to fill your ‘alt’ text with lots of related keywords in an attempt to improve your ranking. This will make your site less user-friendly (imagine what it would be like for people using screen readers to hear all those keywords!) and it may be perceived as spam.

6. Use descriptive and accurate anchor text. Anchor text is the text used to link to pages within your website. For example, you might wish to point your visitors to another page containing pictures of your latest products and specials. Using the text ‘Photos of our latest products and specials’ as the link is far better than using the text ‘Click here’ or similar.

7. Images are easily and often copied by internet users, so Google finds many copies of the same image online. If you have ever done a Google Images search you will know that you will find the same image over and over again. To increase the chances of Google identifying your website as the original source of the image, provide lots of information about the image using the tips described above. Unfortunately protecting your images too much can result in decreased usability – decreasing user interaction with your images and reducing their visibility to search engines. Think about making your images available under a Creative Commons license that requires attribution and a back-link to your website.

8. Make visiting your website a great user experience and attractive for visitors that arrive at your site via Google Images. Use good quality photos, put them near the top of your page, store similar images together on your image directories, and specify the width and height of your images to speed up their loading time. You can also consider having stand-alone landing pages for each of your images where you can put all the related information and even comment boxes for your images.

Next time – Follow Google’s technical guidelines…