If you’re serious about improving your SEO, then you’ve probably already taken the time to generate a sitemap and construct dynamic, descriptive <title> tags.
Although I guarantee that you’ll see high-impact, positive effects from those changes, I doubt very seriously that either of them will flat out blow you away.
Today, however, I’m going to share a tip with you that, once implemented, will knock your socks off. It’s like the California Gold Rush, and you, my friend, are a savvy prospector. So saddle up, and let’s go panning for search engine gold!
Image Search — The Wild, Wild West!
With all of the talent and economic incentives driving competition in the keyword industry, it comes as no surprise that ranking for desirable keywords is a difficult task. As a result, generating tons of traffic from keywords alone is a process that is becoming more protracted all the time—if you want to rank well, you better settle in for the long haul.
Maybe.
The truth here is that you can start ranking today for competitive keywords in a slightly different environment—Google image search.
Some of you might be thinking, “Image search, who cares?”
But, once you understand just how potent Google image search really is, then I guarantee that you will be first in line to take advantage of the associated benefits.
To illustrate this potency, I’ve done a very brief analysis of my image searches versus my overall searches since August of 2006.
Figure 1. Five month snapshot of Image Searches vs. Total Searches at Pearsonified.
The graph above contains some very unexpected and remarkable data—over the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches! I don’t know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I’m always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do!
These numbers suggest that the image search market is far less competitive than keyword search, and I’m willing to bet that if you focus on image search optimization, you will reap some pretty huge benefits in the form of traffic and pageviews.
And if you’re anything like me, you’re all over this 
So now this begs the question: How do you take advantage of image search and rule Google’s wild, wild west?
Optimizing Your Site for Google Image Search
Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the “best practices” heading for Webmasters of all shapes, sizes, and knowledge levels. Simply put, if you are truly running your site the right way, then image optimization is a de facto benefit.
What, then, is the proper way to construct an image reference in XHTML, and what aspects of this help in Google’s image search?
Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:
- A
srcattribute specifying the URL of the image - A
widthdeclaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels - A
heightdeclaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels - An
altattribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO - A
titleattribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image
For this example, we’ll use the image of a yellow hot air balloon at right, which is 220 pixels wide by 212 pixels high.
When we apply the five key items from above with the elements from our example image, we end up with an XHTML image reference that looks something like this:
<img src="http://mysite.com/yellow_hot_air_balloon.jpg" width="220" height="212" alt="Yellow hot air balloon" title="Yellow hot air balloon" />
That’s all there is to it! If you’re not accustomed to providing anything more than a src URL with your images, then you are probably slightly dismayed over the additional work that you’ll have to put in here in order to optimize your images.
All I can say to you is this—the benefits from running a Website with fully standards-compliant markup are amazing, and image optimization is one of those things that produces extremely tangible results. You would be wise to do this sooner rather than later.
A Final Word on Google Image Search
Based on my search results from the past few months, I have every reason to believe that Google places a premium on two things when ranking images in its results:
- the
altattribute of the image - the context of the page and the relevance of the
altattribute thereto
Of course, there are other factors that influence how high your images will rank, but I believe that these two are the most important.
Finally, if you’ve been running your site for six months or more, then I guarantee you’ll see some pretty dramatic results from implementing this type of image optimization. And of course, I really appreciate you stopping by to read this, but don’t you have some coding to do?
This is the fourth in a series of posts covering SEO “best practices” called SEO for Everybody.
There are lots of simple tweaks that average, everyday users can make to their Web sites that will drastically improve both overall accessibility and search engine performance. The goal of SEO for Everybody is to help guide those users through these basic processes, thus resulting in a more accessible, utopian universe.
Or something like that
165 Comments ↓
[...] Improving your search results with Images [...]
Great post, Chris, and a good reminder that valid code is itself part of SEO.
I’m with you on the results as well, having seen pretty much the same increase since I started “alt”ing my images.
One thing I’d like to add: the images you use should themselves be sized to the on-site version. Meaning, if you have a 400×400 image which you then resize via the line to 200×200 or something, you can end up with a pixellated image. At least, that’s been my experience with our pal IE. If you want a 200×200 image, save and upload it as a 200×200 image, and include the height and width details. You’re golden then!
Thanks, man!
After looking high and low for DATA that supports the importance of blog sitemaps, I’ve haven’t found any at all. Can you provide it?
Seems to me that if you have a Categories or Archives widget, then 100% of your posts are already accessible by the Google spider.
Wow! Too easy. I guess it’s time to start placing images on my blog. Thanks.
Chris — Categories and archives widgets do not link to all internal pages, nor do they link to all available feeds from your site.
In addition, what if you don’t want all that information in your sidebar? Do you think a sitemap would be useful then?
It’s peace of mind at the cost of one link off your home page. I’ll take that every time.
Good post but I would always recommend using yellow-hot-air-balloon.jpg instead.
Mad4,
I think that’s a matter of personal preference. I like underscores because they are more reminiscent of spaces. Hyphens, on the other hand, are common syntax for combined words and word breaks between lines.
I think the underscore provides a clearer distinction, so I prefer to go with that.
Are you laying the guilt groundwork again Pearson?
Well I guess you could go play Madden instead…
[...] Read Chris’ post on Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak to find out how you too, can increase your traffic. Share and Enjoy:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
But does it convert well?
Great article. I had lots of images already in my blog, but now i added the alt attribute.
Chris, if you are doing image optimizatio for traffic, you’d rather know that hyphens are preferred over underscores and your personal preference should play little role here.
Also, I suspect image optimization should be valuable for image-heavy websites, such as online shops, photo galleries, etc. The best way to optimize an image, though, is to write a paragraph of text and put it as close as possible to the image, though.
Google image searches can definitely drive a lot of traffic to your site. I made a “digital art christmas card” a while back. In the month of December this little gem drove a huge amount of traffic to my site.
Yes it was mainly short visits, but still if 5% of these people visiting stayed and read a bit more on my site I’m happy!
TJ, Mark — The traffic doesn’t convert well, but you ought to look at it like fishing. If you don’t cast lines out there, you’re not going to catch anything.
The bottom line for me is that I want as many people from as many different disciplines as possible to visit my site. I feel like Google image search is an excellent way to put your site out there in front of people who would likely never find it otherwise.
Yuri — That’s an excellent article that I’d recommend to anyone reading this post.
Back when I started this site, I was running on MovableType, which constructed my permalinks with underscores rather than dashes. I liked the clean look, and that’s been a part of my MO ever since. To be honest, I had never read anything to speak positively or negatively about either setup, but after reading Matt Cutts’ article, I’m tempted to at least change the way my files are constructed.
I’m hosed on the permalink end of things, but that’s life if you don’t start your blog on WordPress.
Ironically, pretty much the only image on my site visited via Google Image Search is a quick piece of culture jamming I did in response to the censorship of Google China. It still gets a couple of hits each day from that source!
[...] Original post by Chris P. and software by Elliott Back Filed under SEO, SEO for Everybody by Permalink • Print • Email • Comment [...]
“I think that’s a matter of personal preference. I like underscores because they are more reminiscent of spaces.”
Are you kidding? When you name ain image “yellow_hot_balloons.jpg”, it’s only going to come up for a search for “yellow_hot_balloons.” Who on earth is going to search for that?
Always use dashes between words.
When I noticed a big traffic boost a while ago, comming from Google Image Search, I did a little experiment which you can find at How to use beautiful women for website traffic increase.
Halfdeck,
There’s nothing quite like visiting someone’s site and acting like an absolute dick, is there?
“There’s nothing quite like visiting someone’s site and acting like an absolute dick, is there?”
Chris, how is stating a fact “acting like an absolute dick”? Did I call you names? No. You’re the one accusing me of “acting like a dick.” Nice pun on my nick btw.
How about treating your visitors with a little more respect?
One thing you clearly fail to understand is that the rest of the world may not be aware of something that you consider to be common knowledge.
By phrasing your remark like this, you’ve basically framed it in such a way as to make me look like an idiot for not knowing that Google would differentiate (read: penalize?) users for incorporating underscores rather than dashes.
Pardon me (and a zillion others, I’m sure) for missing that line in the handbook.
I do know one thing for certain, however. I’ve built this site (and two others—Tubetorial and Cutline) by providing real-world solutions to “simple” problems. If I’ve learned anything from the experience, it’s that empowering users rather than insulting them like they know nothing is definitely the way to go.
And should you choose to try and use my own words against me here, I’ve already explained to you why I responded like I did.
You could have chosen to take the suggestion route with your comment, but instead, you veered down the path of a pseudo-authoritative insult.
How do you expect me to take that any other way than personally, especially given the nature of the sites I’ve built and now maintain?
Hey Chris,
Don’t you know that you should….er, I mean, I had read Matt’s article a while back and it reaffirmed what I believed about dashes over underscores.
As for the images, that was one of the things I used to score a couple of corporate blog customers.
They had hundreds of products in the “Gallery”, yet they weren’t indexed or even findable by searchers.
I built them a blog, write articles to go with each product image and now they get ‘thousands’ of hits each month just from images.
Now that you’ve alerted everyone, I’ll have to find a new angle.
Like, thanks buddy
“By phrasing your remark like this, you’ve basically framed it in such a way as to make me look like an idiot for not knowing that Google would differentiate (read: penalize?) users for incorporating underscores rather than dashes.”
Chris, let me get this straight. If I wrote that “earth is flat” on my blog and you post a comment saying “are you kidding? The earth is round” - I’m supposed to take that as an insult? How can you be that sensitive?
I’d either debate you on the point IF I had a ground to stand on, or admit I was wrong and move on. Instead, you’re claiming I insulted you and you openly insult me by calling me a dick.
Everyone in SEO has said something that later turned out to be completely wrong. For example, Matt Cutts once said Google prefers
<i>to<em>. After talking to another Google engineer, he corrected himself, saying Google treats them both equally.I admit I intentionally left a slightly abrasive comment to stir up a little drama, but I’m don’t write mean spirited comments, and my main point of using dashes instead of underscores is something that will help your readers.
I could have gone much further than that by pointing out that your statement “context of the page” is vague. But I didn’t.
Google looks at several things when indexing images, including:
- TITLE tag
- H1 tag
- keywords in ALT attribute
- keywords in urls, IF separated by dashes
- keywords in image PATH
- keywords in the url an image is on is irrelevant
- keywords in text ~10 words radius above and below an IMG element in source code
- image resolution, higher the better
- image must be on a page listed in the main index - Google seems to ignore images on supplemental pages.
- If any of those keywords contain references to sex, the images may be filtered out with SafeSearch active.
- If keywords in the META keyword tag contain sex-related words, the images will be filtered out with Safe Search activated.
Now you can go and steal all my Google image traffic.
One last thing:
Since anchor text is unreliable when determining the content of an image and there’s no link popularity metric for images, Google uses PageRank of the url an image is on as a ranking factor.
The fact that the earth is flat is common knowledge.
Practices deemed acceptable by the Goog are far less ubiquitous, I’m afraid.
That said, you revealed precisely why I was angered by your comment:
This is not a snarky blog by any means. On the contrary, I run it as a facilitative and (hopefully) inspirational resource.
As a result, comments like yours (which are quite rare around here these days) go against everything that I want this site to stand for.
Although I realize it’s probably too idealistic, I believe that both I and my readers can use this site to help one another. Moreover, I hope we can accomplish that through constructive means.
It’s certainly easy to speak with a brash edge from an anonymous podium, but you won’t win friends with an abrasive affront if you’re face to face. I realize that me calling you a “dick” does little to further my cause, but I’m the ringleader around here, and you pissed me off
Finally, I am aware of the other points you mention in the bullets above, which is precisely why I said that Google places a premium on the two areas that I mentioned in the post. That’s not to say those are the only things Google considers—they’re only pieces of a much larger puzzle.
Chris, another very useful post. I was just wondering what are some of the top image searches on Google? I would imagine they would be similar to the text based ones… ie… celebrities etc. I know my top image search on my site is Cocker spaniel, which pulls up a picture of my dog. Maybe your dogs may be more important to site traffic than you think…
John
John,
It’s funny you should say that, because for about three weeks, I had two pictures ranking on the second page of results for “dogs.”
In that three week span, those images pulled an alarming 2246 people to this site. If you look at the graph in the post, you can see a massive jump in image searches in October and November, and this is almost entirely due to the “dogs” search. After only a few weeks of ranking, though, my images disappeared from the second page of results, and just like that, my number of image searches for “dogs” trailed back towards zero.
[...] obvious, but good to remember ….. here [...]
[...] I’m always looking for new ways to generate more traffic to my blog. I’ve heard several times before that images posted within an article can help to increase the number of visitors. I’ve never really understood why this might be so, but apparently there are some legitimate reasons why. Chris from Pearsonified has posted an article that discusses one big reason you could be getting more traffic with images and exactly how to do it. [...]
[...] Pearsonified recently wrote another great post addressing a topic I wanted to cover here on my blog, he beat me to it though. [...]
‘I realize that the type of traffic you get from Google image search is not going to convert well’
I always thought image search referers would just watch the image and leave, which would result in near 100% bounce rates. Just recently, I found out that the bounce rate of the approximately 1000 image search referers I receive each month, is close to 50%.
I’ll implement some of your tips and try if I can improve my image search referers a bit more.
I would strongly recommend dashes to underscores.
Why? Because users rarely ever see the image filenames. In this instance, us W3C junkies can optimize for google and not for looks or user.
Also I’ve heard from the blackhat underground at syndk8.net that google has begun considering domain names with two or more dashes as webspam, although I’m not sure if it applies to the image search as well.
An excellent learning activity would be reading matt cutts blog from the very first post, which I’m still doing
Or read a quick summary of the 21 best tips:
http://www.seoegghead.com/blog/seo/mattcuttsarama-a-summary-of-useful-stuff-matt-cutts-has-said-p112.html
I tested all three major search engines, and msn is the only one that doesn’t look at underscores as a continuation of the previous word:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=ftp_binary&sourceid=Mozilla-search&form=CHROME
Just a question: Is it obliged to add width and height to be Xhtml compliant? or you can be found without these 2?
Well, I guess if you are stuck with the underscores, it may be better to leave it as it is, indeed.
However, that’d make a nice case study on the effect of underscores vs hyphens. You could easily write a script to replace underscores with dashes and redirect the old pages to the new ones, right?
Franck — By specifying the
widthandheightattributes, you effectively pre-apportion that space on the Web page for the image. This way, as the image loads, it will fill the allotted space without pushing and realigning text all over the page.Essentially, it’s just a sound practice that aids in smoother page loads, which is just another piece in the user experience puzzle.
Yuri — I imagine that if I actually knew how to write a script to interact with my WordPress database, then it might be fairly simple to do.
That said, I’ve never done any direct MySQL interaction through PHP or any other server-side language.
So I guess what I’m getting at here is this: it wouldn’t be easy for me to do right now
Thank you for clarifications Chris.
Just wanted to say: I spend all night yesterday to show my archive page for my cutline blog, without success. What is amazing is that I did it on a second blog very easily…
I will try again… next week. I am not the best with technical things. It’s strange, but it seems that everything is becoming PHP.
I’m learning.
This may be a little off topic but I have a question:
What is “Blogger Law” around using other websites and peoples images?
For example, I may be writing an article on dogs on my blog so in order to spice up my post a little I go looking for a dog picture on Google image search and lets say I happen to find one of Chris’s dog pictures which I would like to use. Is it cool to use it or not?
Phil.
Ah, codeland — the only place where adults argue over underscores and hypens.
Thank you, Chris, for reminding us about valid code. I’ve definitely got to get all those images tagged properly.
Phil,
For all of your Blogger Law needs, check out the aptly-named Tubetorial series, Blogger Law 101.
Another great article, thx!
[...] Chris Pearson writes that he got 50+% increase in search-engine referrals for competitive keywords by targeting a previously untapped resource of search engines: image search. Chris particularly talks about Google Image Search in his latest writeup. [O]ver the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches! I don’t know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I’m always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do! [...]
Hi Chris,
I wanted to drop a line and give you a heads up. Some “jerk” has hacked a few SEO blogs and put up a hit list, unfortunately you are on it. I posted about it on SearchMarketingGurus - but I wanted to make sure you knew about it - couldn’t find an email to contact you at, so I hope this is ok - feel free to delete this!
~Li
Thanks Li! I’m working right now to try and thwart this.
[...] We’ve written about search engine optimization (SEO) here one time or another, and I think it’s already a given that good use of markup standards (properly formed HTML, use of CSS) aids in optimizing for Google searches. However, the problem with optimizing for Google search is competition. There are just so many people who have websites about the same product, service or topic that your website or blog is about. Because of this, designer Chris Pearson thinks it would be worthwhile to optimize for Google image search as well. In fact, he says he got an upsurge in referrals from Google image search, particularly when he started optimizing how he inserted images on his site. … over the last 5 months, nearly 53% of my total searches have come in the form of image searches! I don’t know about you, but when I think about inbound searches to my site, I’m always thinking in terms of keywords, not images. As it turns out, I probably ought to pay more attention to image optimization than I currently do! [...]
[...] Google Image Optimization - Chris Pearson [...]
[...] Read more at pearsonified Bookmark to: [...]
Hi Chris
Thanks for this series …
Question about img src - do you believe Google treats a fully qualified URL vs relative path to an image differently?
Jason
JasonM,
I don’t think there’s any real difference there, but in spite of that belief, I am always careful to use absolute file paths when constructing
imgreferences. I think it’s probably more paranoia on my part than anything else.Your seo advice seems pretty circumspect or sophomoric, like the absolute versus relative comment above, or the dashes versus underscore comment.
You haven’t even read through all of matt cutts blog, but anyone who is anyone in seo reads it religiously. That tells me you’re new to the world of seo, so welcome to it!
Some friendly but blunt advice,
Heather Frunt
Heather,
The advice that I’ve provided in my series, SEO for Everybody, is nothing more than simple SEO strategies that anyone can (and should) use when constructing a Web site.
I wrote about specific topics because I knew I was mostly qualified to speak about them and relay the information to my readers. However, people have solicited my advice in the comments, and I’ve done the best I can to answer them based on the knowledge that I have.
Obviously, there are times when my knowledge is inadequate, and this resulted in my giving answers that were incorrect.
I’m not happy about that, of course, mostly because accuracy is important to me. However, I have never claimed to be an SEO specialist, nor have I ever been paid to perform SEO services for anyone.
It is true that I composed a series on SEO tips and tactics, but the idea was to present some rudimentary techniques that should basically become standard practices for building a Website of any kind.
So, while I certainly appreciate the critical eye you’ve shown, I would also appreciate it if you’d read the rest of my site. If you had already done so, then you’d know that I’m a designer, writer, thinker, and knowledge-sharer—not an SEO.
In spite of your criticism, the SEO for Everybody series has been quite successful, and I feel as though my readers have not only appreciated, but also benefited from the advice that I’ve shared.
Finally, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t leave a spammy URL along with your comments (I removed it and replaced it with your name, assuming that is your name).
Why is it that people who rag you on your own comment thread have to leave either an anonymous comment or a bogus URL?
So are you actively trying to rank for certain images? :p
Heather’s quite the —what’s the word I’m looking for—??? Chris, I appreciate your site as I’m not a self-professed expert anything, including SEO. I’m a guy who can’t even find time to get what lame content I generate onto Cutline. I just lurk, read and learn (often quite slowly). Would that I had Ms. Frunt’s command of all this stuff. But, alas - I do not. Keep writing so folks like me can keep learning.
Dang people - SEO isn’t anyone’s “bag”. Sure there are some hard core elements we’d do well to nail down, but SEO is as dynamic as it can get. I wouldn’t dare to call anyone a specialist. I know I’m not, but then I’ve only been in the game a few years and don’t play it hard.
So, back to the subject of images and such…
I have a personal blog at http://www.ohmystinkinheck.com (yes, that ’s its name) and have found that flickr is a nice way to draw in people as well.
I used to upload my images to the server via FTP and didn’t fiddle-faddle with the likes of flickr. When it first came out I ranked it right there with photobucket and shutterfly for sharing images.
I was wrong.
I’ve just started blogging again after quite a siesta and flickr can really drive people to your site.
Right - the traffic/ctr/blah blah blah … might not be absolutely targeted, but there are groups on flickr that can be targeted that would match your audience.
Anyway, my two cents.
*ducking*
Oh, sorry - important note. If you blog directly from flickr it’d serve you well to make sure to remove the alt tag “photo sharing” for something more relevant as well.
Or set it up to take your title tag and make sure you don’t just leave your image as a number when downloading.
Mario — Not for anything in particular. As a whole, though, I am actively constructing image references so that Google can find them more easily.
I don’t have any subtle profiteering scheme going on, although I suppose that if I really tried to hit this hard, I could make a buck here or there solely through image search exploitation.
Again, though, that’s not my bag
Leonard — Thanks!
ChrisP
In Google Webmasters you can turn on enhanced image search for your site.
Do you know anything about this ?
Jason
Jason,
I just completed the verification process and opted into the enhanced image search program. I’m going to follow up with a post about the Google Webmaster toolkit soon, because I think it contains some interesting stuff and procedures that any Webmaster should know and do.
Regarding the enhanced image search, here’s what I think is up:
alttag of an image of a watermelon say “Britney Spears” in an attempt to scrape traffic, and this enhanced image search pretty much eliminates that possibility.Chris,
To take advantage of image search, do the images need to be hosted on your site? Or is there still some advantage to “alt” tagging the images that you hotlink?
To Chris, sorry I didn’t read your site, other than two posts.
The best beginner seo book which I would recommend is Search
Engine Optimization For Dummies, which is very
good forthe absolute beginner.
If that’s too easy, the only other SEO-related book that’s worth any of your time is Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.
Bwahahaha - Heather, Chris DESIGNED Aaron Wall’s site. He is all too familiar with the book.
Laff, Heather, thanks for jumping on that one for me. I had SEObook.com queued up in my browser this morning so I would remember to comment, but you beat me to the punch!
OK. I answered my own question by looking in my logs.
The answer is YES - in fact, often times hotlinked images outperform the original.
Micah,
I thought I had answered that, but I just checked through the comments—nada.
Sorry about that, but my guess was that hotlinked images wouldn’t be any different than regular images.
Your results are pretty interesting, and I guess we all know that Perez Hilton is getting tons of inbound searches from hotlinked images as well
Chris,
You may be interested in the Yahoo SiteExplorer [beta] page aswell - this one seems to be buried a little deeper. (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com)
Im putting together a page for my clients to help manage all their pages - havent been able to find anything for msn with any real substance.
[...] In it Chris outlines how to optimize images that you might use on your blog to increase the chances of them being highly ranked in Google Image Search. [...]
[...] Chris Pearson, writes an excellent piece about how important tag attributes are in optimizing your site and images for GIS (Google Image Search) Optimizing Your Website for Google Image Search [...]
Great information, I’d just started doing this with images but your post gives me even better steps on how to do this. Thanks.
I ran a test on my blog a couple months back and it offered proof that the big 3 search engines pay no attention at all to the TITLE attribute of the image. ALT attribute - yes. But not the TITLE.
Matt,
I recommend the use of the
titleattribute because it creates tooltips in Gecko-based browsers (read: good ones) when the user hovers her mouse over an image.I agree with you in the sense that an image
titleis not going to affect your rankings one way or the other.Thanks for the info. This will helps as I dont have a blog I’d have to go back and redo. I can implement this now and use it as I go. One question though…what software do you use to blog with, or do you just use the WP interface? I’d like to find a robust offline blogging software, one with plenty of features that implement good SEO tactics easily.
Rian,
I use (and highly recommend) the open source version of WordPress. Slap the Cutline theme on it, and boom—instant SEO gratification.
I actually am using the Cutline theme and like it alot. But I was trying to customize the style sheet and a few other things. In the process, I probably broke some of the basic formating. So all you use it WP? No offline tool…the Zoundry tool I’m using now is driving me nuts. I’ve spent more time trying to get formating right, that actual blogging.
[...] The title of this article is “How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak”. Don’t know about that, but this is a goos SEO “tip”. [...]
i wonder with the new production release of GIS changes the value of alt and title tags. probabaly not but its a thought. but i must say i miss having the dimensions displayed. stylish script here i come
[...] SEO experts believe that this technique that Chris outlines will also help with SEO in Google Search (and other search engines). [...]
I’ve long since been a staunch advocate of using the ALT attribute on my images - and I frequently use the TITle attribute on hyperlinks - but I had never heard about using the TITLE attribute on images. I’ve added this into my blog posting regimen.
Now, about the page title, however… Since I’m using Blogger, it generates each page off of a base template so every blog post page bears the same title. Any suggestions about getting around this? There are other pages within my site, of course, and I do use unique and meaningful titles on those.
[...] Is it just me, or is pretty much every Marketing and SEO Blog on the internet posting about how to Optimize your site for Google Images traffic, its just as if people have finally realised they can get traffic from the images, heres a few examples. ProBlogger, Pearsonified, Tucows. Now, don’t get us wrong, theres nothing wrong with bloggers telling people about new ways to get more traffic to their websites, but it is interesting how a lot of people blog about it at the same time, although its not something ‘new’. In the spirit of Google ol’ Search engine optimization, heres a look at what you can do to optimize your images for better rankings on Google Image Search. [...]
[...] more…. [...]
I also have gotten a big increase in traffic from Google Image Search, starting on October 18, 2006. I track traffic with SiteMeter, and went from an average of about 30 visitors a day to 1,300 on thte first day. The bump up has continued to the present, although not quite at the same level. The only bad thing is that the nature of the searches is such that it has encouraged less “uplifting” blog posting, although doing normal posting has not noticeably detracted from traffic. Traffic now depends on Google behavior, which seems unfortunate. If they changed what they were doing, for whatever reason, they could have a big, negative impact on a lot of sites and blogs. Of course, even from normal Google searches, that is true. Just look at the “Google Sandbox Effect” and the effects of the new release and policy in late 2003.
Interesting. I never would have thought about optimizing for image searches. Thanks for sharing; doublely so for citing actual traffic data.
[...] February 25, 2007 at 8:14 am · Filed under Uncategorized Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak Learn how to put yourself miles ahead of the competition by optimizing images on your site.[news][entertainment][technology][programming] [...]
Hi Chris
I finally found time to go back and get busy re-coding all those images. Not quite done yet, but well on the way. It takes a while, so it will be interesting to see any effect.
In selecting new names for the images, it struck me, though, to ask you whether you see benefit in short, snappy single word tags (like your ‘dogs’ example, up above), or whether it’s useful to go for multiple tags if there are multiple subjects in a picture, or if more detail is required.
For example, would ‘darren clarke ryder cup k-club ireland 2006′ pick up more hits, more easily, than ‘darren clarke’.
Using multiple key words within an image tag creates a much longer image url, but is it more SEO-optimised this way ?
To Roadsofstone - remember that the purpose of alt tags is for users who cannot see the images - whether because they are blind or because they have images turned off in their browser (text only). Alt tags should be named with that as their primary purpose. I think Google gets wise to alt tags that abuse this purpose.
Be careful about renaming image url’s. The google image bot does not spider very often. If you change an image url it may be months til it gets crawled and indexed again.
Chris, thanks for these fabulous insights and tips. I will try to implement the tech stuff as best as I can.
Thanks again for pouring your heart, mind, soul and wit into your posts
Lawton
[...] Chris Pearson is after writing a blog post which I have had a interest in for quite some time - SEO Image Optimization. [...]
Hi Chris, nice post (and cutline theme
)
How are you monitoring your referals from Google and Yahoo search? What software are you using?
I am not sure what Chris uses, but I use a combination of Google Analytics, the premium version of IndexTools, and the upgraded version of SiteMeter. Google Analytics and the low-end version of SiteMeter are both free. Google Analytics has a nice pie chart view of where your referrals are coming from. My percentage of Google Image Search referrals is high, typically over 50% on days where the visitors are now usually 1,000 a day or more. I have seen periods where referrals from the various international versions of Google Image Search have been 90%, if there is some hot topic.
Chris ,
id actually considered this route recently and will be taking your article , digesting and actioning soon!
Cheers!
[...] Feeling Sandboxed - How To Get 53% More Searches With One Tweak - Chris at Pearsonified.com explains how images can dramatically increase your traffic. [...]
[...] Read Chris’ post on Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak to find out how you too, can increase your traffic. [...]
Hi Chris
Firstly, RESPECT: I’ve recently “upgraded” to your cutline template: what a superior piece of software engineering and user-friendly, and spacious, elegant layout - that really suits my travel-blog madness, very well … thanking you for your efforts.
I’m not a total-technie and I use the basic.com- version and was wondering if/when you will add random headers, an archive that also lists all blogs by title, the option to switch to black background/white text, and possibly page layout templates beyond the two basic ones offered … I realize this is - work … But, these are only suggestions for an upgrade; as CUTLINE is well cool, as is !!!
http://thecandytrail.wordpress.com/
OR: http://www.thecandytrail.com/
Check me out sometime … say, Hi
REGARDS - MRP
OK, I may be coming late to reading this but it remains great stuff - and a topic I’m very much interested in. Well worth getting more info about - Thanks for the insights.
i’ve optimized my images at some of my blogs but no change in any traffic. I have hundreds of images at my blogs! How long before Google finds it!? I’ve also opted into enhanced image option in web tools at G.
I am not sure how good an example I am, but to show you what can be done: my average visits per month in September 2006 was 18.77. In October, when Google started feeding image search traffic my way, the average visits per day in the month was 417.55. In February 2007, average daily traffic was 1238.21. In March, it was 1288.52. So far in April, it is 2270.91. This is for what has become my high traffic blog. A very high percentage of traffic comes from Google image search. Most of it is from North America, but a the next greatest amount is the UK. It decreases from there. The big increase is due to images, and very little else. But it is partly due to what I am doing, which is celebrity gossip and current events commentary. I don’t know that exactly what I am doing is repeatable.
I realized that what I just said may not be helpful enough. Basically, what is getting me results is linking to images that people want to see (it makes sense, after all). I almost never have the images inline, but have popup links. The images are relevant to the textual content. I would expect that Google would punish someone who was using images in a spamlike manner, where they were not relevant to your content. I am not sure what that means for a commercial sales site. Since the commercial purpose of what I am doing is to attract traffic to see advertising relevant to my content, it works. The key is to have images that people are searching to see. Without that, images are useless.
I get all that. I’ve used only photos that relate to my sites. I have stuff at http://kosamuithailand.blogspot.com as well as hundreds of photos at the main site, http://www.thaipulse.com in the Ko Samui section. I think I’ve optimized them all ok, except maybe the height attrib. isn’t on the blogspot images. Is it THAT important? Again, HOW LONG does it take for Google to index these changes. A month? Someone mentioned 6 months and the changes will definitely be seen - but how quick usually?
There is the Googlebot and the GoogleImageBot (names probably not exact). The ImageBot comes rarely, perhaps 6-8 months between but crawling during that time. The other crawls for text and adjusts in frequency to your updating history. Give it relevant text to crawl - use descriptive text links to larger views of your images. This will show up eventually somewhere in the image results. I think this is what Jim Bender means about pop-up images?
Vern — If your domain is 6 months old or older, then you ought to see your images indexed relatively quickly (like, the next time Google indexes your site). For sites that are out of the sandbox, these types of changes usually take effect very quickly.
[...] Image optimization [...]
Thanks for the great article! I’m definitely going to implement some of your suggestions.
I run a photoblog that has been up for less than two weeks. My daily hit count was at about 3 until one of my pics made it onto the first page of a google image search. I was shocked when I logged into sitemeter and it read 450 unique visitors for that day! (small numbers to some of you, but huge to me!)
Great post!
I just learned how-to put images in my blog last week, and I look forward to working hard on this particular SEO tip.
Wonderfully informative post, Chris! One of the reasons I moved to Wordpress was the opportunity to optimize my blog for image searches. As I blog about guitar related matters such as guitar building and design, I have a bit of photo content to potentially leverage. Thanks so much for the information!
How interesting.Very informative post - as always. I don’t have that many photos on my blog, however from the ones I do have I get many image searches. I’ve always wondered why I’ll have to consider including more, or at least include more often.
I for one can absolutely guarantee that this is great advice for everyone to follow. My site may not have top of the line and up to the minute high quality content. But each and everyday, I receive hundreds of hits from google, msn, and various other search facilities, with people looking for images. I for one say, this is one of the major factors that drives a heavy portion of the new visitors to my site.
Wow. I run several sites with tons of images on them because they are artwork sites, displaying and selling original art work. This image optimization could make a huge difference.
Thanks a lot.
This looks like a good discovery… I am going to implement this right now.
[...] Without those image elements you will miss out on a substantial amount Image Search traffic. This could cost you 50% of your visitors or more depending on how many images you have. [...]
[...] inspiriert von pearson [...]
[...] Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak Optimiziranje slika (tags: seo) [...]
I am amazed at how simple yet effect this seems to be. I will be furiously changing all of my images posts to be correctly picked up by Google’s image search.
I have observed a high rise through google images in recent months.
For this what you have to do is a basic thing just follow coding standards and eventually you will get the results.
I think the blue section of your graph should be “Other Searches”, not all searches (as far as I can tell the bar as a whole represents all searches).
I gather defining image dimensions via CSS will not help search engines determine their size? Pitty as it’s often convenient to define image sizes in CSS.. still allows the browser to reserve the space but doesn’t require extra attributes in the markup.
[...] Feeling Sandboxed? How You Can Get 53% More Searches with One Tweak (pearsonified.com, 27 saves) [...]
Good solid advice about images; I’ve noticed similarly that Google Image Search drives a lot of traffic to Le Blog Exuberance, my blog.
Another key aspect of site development is writing; I’ve put together a list of writing for the web guidelines, which I have all my clients read if they’re going to do the site writing themselves (even if they’re not professional, or particularly good, writers).
Thanks for good advise.
Thanks for this wonderful tip!
Question: Has anyone tested using the longdesc tag to see whether it helps get better Google Images placement?
David M — I have not tested that, and I haven’t come across any posts where people talk about using
longdesc, either. I’d be interested to see if that makes any difference or not.Get More Traffic
Great post! Very informative.Keep up the great job.
I’ve been using alt tags since I put my first image on my very first website (honest), I just did a quick check of the image SERPs for one particular phrase “cosmic dawn”. The image with this alt tag did not show up, but my RSS newsfeed logo did, clicking the image in Google Images took me to the page entitled Cosmic Dawn wherein lies the original image with that phrase as its alt tag. Odd.
db
Re: comments from Jan. 19 on hotlinked images results in image searches - I have been perplexed at the great image search result/rank? of an image on another site linked by a descriptive text link on my site. Image result returns the image in some cases in first place, with the name of the originating site, but clicking the google link leads to the page on my site where the text link is located. Visitors land on my site. (Its no traffic to speak of, but still..) Why doesn’t Google direct to the site where the picture is hosted? I am not even showing the picture on my site, though the text link is to the image’s url. Separately I have a descriptive text link to the site where the image is hosted in its context. And of course the context of my links is topical. I don’t think this is a hotlinked image but am not sure what one calls it or if its ok this way.
great post, I have always found that image links are a little less weight than regular text links for SEO. Google image search however does crank up the volume of searches.
Great article. Actually - quick question - anyone has any idea what’s beter for the name of the image - dashes or underscores?
nice tip , i’m not using google image search on my sites but i will try it and share my opinions
thanks
Valuable info.
@Stanley:
According to Matt Cutts, the dash is better, but soon the underscore will be counted the same way.
Tha’ts good, I am for hyphens!
Go hyphen! Go hyphen! Go hyphen!
I have a question. Does it matter if the images are on my server or on Photobucket? Because I used all the tags and I remember getting double the traffic I have today.
I moved to PB due to bandwidth issues and I don’t know if it’s because of that.
I have seen the decline in traffic from Google Image Search over time, as they must be doing some things differently. I am now mostly hosting images for my blog on Blogspot. Traffic peaked back in May and June and then started to decline in July, with a big bump up in mid-September. Traffic from this source is pretty tenuous, as Google will continue to evolve and that will affect traffic numbers.
Jim: I don’t understand your reasoning for why image traffic is “tenuous”. Yes Google tweaks the algorithms resulting in varying results but that’s also the case for traditional search engine traffic.
Results in general will vary but image traffic can still be a good source of traffic for the topics.
Is that what the google.com/referral ’s are in analytics, people using image search?
mlankton — I think it could be either Google search (most likely) or Google image search. I’m going to guess it’s the former.
You’ll see it as “images.google.com (referral)” in your analytics.
By the way, I started using the longdesc tag on one of my sites and now have quite a bit of image-generated traffic. I can’t prove longdesc is the reason — also got a bunch of backlinks around the same time. I wish I had done a scientific test of some sort to see if I can attribute having more indexed photos to using longdesc. Anyways, I’ll keep using it. SEO aside, it’s great to make sites more accessible to everyone.
Great tips,
I turned on the image search quite a while ago but forgot to start adding alts and titles. GOod reminder to get that into the code.
[...] 但是像上述的代码组合还不算完善，一个标准的图片嵌入代码应当包含哪些元素呢？从Pearsonified那里我们得知，它应当包含5个关键性元素：src、width、height、alt和title。其中当然是alt元素最为关键。 举个例子，比如旁边这张SEO图片，长宽为239×104。那么它规范的HTML代码就应当为： [...]
Hey Chris, thanks for being a great resource for newbs to this stuff like me. I like how you make things user friendly and btw, I am using your cutline theme on my blog! Looks great!
Thanks for this great insight! I had no idea thee was such a thing as image marketing. I always thought they were just pretty items on our site.
[...] them. I’ll be looking at your headlines, how you write, linking strategies, your use of images, structure of your posts and more. For good measure I’ll look at your blog headlines [...]
Thanks a lot!
I couldn’t figure out what I’d been doing wrong. Now I believe I need to specify a “width” in order for Google to find my images.
Michael
You made the Cutline theme too!? Nice work, I really enjoy it. I wish I could use subscribe to comments plugin with it. Does anyone know if I can simply add the “width” of the images as a shortcut and just leave out “height”?
Hello Chris,
I appreciate the blog you’ve done here. It is very informative and helpful.
I have a website, blog, and forum. I would like to set up google advanced image search. I am using your information here and have another source to investigate before making the modifications.
My question to you is this:
On my forum, where there is a vbulletin…
I have a bunch of images on the site and when I post an image in a thread I can either attach it, or I can link it with BB Code Tags [IMG*] of course. My question is how do I optimize forum images or images on the forum with the HTML without allowing HTML all over my website? I mean, I don’t want users to be embedding HTML in threads of course.
Is there any quick way for me to optimize them all? Like a code to cover all images with alt tags for titles of the image, without manually inserting it for each one?
Anything I can do in the Administrator CP with your suggestion here?
Thank you for your response Chris,
Legion
I must admit, I’ve never used the “Title” attribute before for my web images but will start now post haste!
I’ve always used underscores for image alt text and I’m positive Google gives credence to all words now as separate keywords.
Thanks for the info.
Im implementing this right now, I did know that alt attribut would help, but had no idea i was ment to implement width and height.
Ill report back with the results I get.
After a week with no response and the fact that I see my emails were edited out of my previous post for no reason at all, as well as my comment edited. It clearly shows that you most likely have no idea the answers to my questions.
I’m not upset or putting you down, it’s just unfortunate. No matter though, this isn’t really as important as we’re making it out to be here.
Thanks anyway,
Legion
What is meant by “tuned on image search”? Where do you go to turn it on and how?
@Joni - Go to your Google Webmaster Tools. Click “Tools” in the left sidebar and then click “Enable Enhanced Image Search”.
There’s a check box to enable it as well as a link that explains what the enhanced search is about.
Hope this helps!
Wow great info hear and all for free, congrats on the excellent site dude!
It’s a humbling realization to think that I had a “novel” idea last week by thinking I should optimize my images, only to see that this post is over a year old.
Thanks for the info, great stuff.
Since I’m here… I’m using your cutline temp for my blog. I was wondering if theres an easy way to limit my widgets to the homepage only. I’m a little worried about PR leaks to unimportant pages, and also having duplicate content throughout my site. Any suggestions? Thanks again.
Len
Hi, Chris. I’m a user of your Pressrow theme, which is fantastic! I’ve been browsing through some of your tips latley and the one problem I keep running into is a problem of basic ignorance on my part. I just don’t know how to play with the code underlying my blog.
Great post, traffic from images does convert for me.
Btw, guess what i found in google image search http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=yellow+hot+air+balloon&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
(click the 3rd image)
Ha! What does “The Dick” have to say now? I vote for underscores.
Len
Hi guys, can someone explain why google doesnt find ANY of the images on this page: http://www.zastonj.info/pobarvanke.htm
“pobarvanke” should be the magic keyword which works great on web search (1st page) but image search is another story…
I had everything set except for the Long desc, which I have only added right now. Does the size matters so much?
Thanks a lot!
I’ve found that image file name is also relevant.
For a short time period my blog got tons of visits from google images with a keyword that was only written in the file name (it was called “pija”, cock in spanish!! no questions, please. lol) and ranked first in all google images!
Width and Height are not mandatory. I have done a lot of research on this, and they are not required according to W3C specs. The only reason why people used to suggest Width and Height in the markup was to speed up layout rendering in “table-based layouts” only. The rendering engines needed to determine the dimensions of every table cell before the table could be displayed.
Nowadays, many sites have gotten rid of messy table-based layouts for CSS/XHTML layouts. So, if you don’t use tables, you don’t need to specify the width and height in a tableless layout because the rendering engine will just flow the document and its components as they are downloaded, and make adjustments on the fly.
Also, keep in mind that the extra text required to write out all of those dimensions. If you have lots of photos and you’re writing out the dimensions on every image, you’re just slowing the page down with a few extra kilobytes of text in the markup that aren’t really necessary, especially in a pure CSS layout.
Finally, placing the dimensions of an image in your HTML is purely for styling. Google does not utilize this information because one could easily take a 2000px by 3000px image and scale it down by putting 200px by 300px in the image tag. So, the information is not only unnecessary, but it is also unreliable because it is intended for styling purposes.
I hadn’t thought about the images being searchable. Nice one!
Well, this gets me moving - all these years putting off ‘alt’ and ‘title’ descriptions.
I thought “remarkable data’ was going to be: image searches peaked and declined, suggesting image traffic eventually leads to increased keyword popularity or ranking. Another way to read fig.1?
And re the move to WordPress [post Nov 6, '06] - I’ve a regular site plodding since Dec ‘03. As I write (Mar 08) just incorporating a few WP blogs into its structure that were standalone non-events. The combination this month alone (the first month) has sent my stats through the roof. Far, far more than site and blogs totaled.
Two weeks into 1st month since change, the website has 200% more uniques than any previous month. Suspect its also playing to ‘one big site’ better than ‘lots of small separates’
Anyhoot, thanks for your great and generous sharing of information.
Phil
Chris,
I am new to all of this. The code part is fascinating/addicting to me but its all very new. I’m using your cutline theme for my blog, and I can’t get the title=”…” part to save. I can adjust the alt, the height width etc, but when i save, the title part is just, gone. I looked in the forums and saw a couple of other people with the same problem but was not able to find an answer. Help a newbie?
Hey - Thanks for this great roundup! I’m just researching various standpoints for image optimization and your post is the #1 post in the todo/toread list for my team!
thanks!
Christoph
Jenn — Are you an Administrator for the site, or are you an Editor? Whenever I’ve encountered this problem in the past, it’s been because the writer was not an Administrator. By default, WordPress will strip additional markup (
classandtitleattributes, for example) for everyone other than admins.Also, if you still experience troubles, try turning off the WYSIWYG editor, and then save your post with changes made only in code view.
Thanks Chris! That was an easy fix and totally worked.
Actually, never mind. I was using my work computer which defaults to IE and IE appears to use the “alt” as the hover words. At home I use firefox, and I’ve changed the settings to have me as admin and I’ve tried turning off the editor and stuff and it still strips the title. I don’t really care because I’m just blogging for fun, but it is always super annoying when things just dont work. It seems to happen a lot for how smart computers are supposed to be. Grrr.
Chris, I didn’t have enough time to read through all 160+ comments, so I apologize if the following was already mentioned.
While I like to see my page views increase, I would not want that if it means that people doing Google image searches arrive at my site so that they could steal my photos. I know for a fact that many image searches are done in an effort to not pay for stock images and as an easy way to find “just what you’re looking for” to place on your blog, your website, whatever. Many people know more than one way to save an image from a site to their pictures folder.
I have for years included alt attributes on my images (and keywords in the image’s URL, with dashes). However, it’s because I know that some people who land on my sites as a result of an image search land there in order to swipe the image, many of the self-taken photos on my sites include some type of identifying watermark or text. If they are going to steal the image to use on their own site and don’t want the watermark/text, they’ll have to at least spend some time photoshopping it.
It’s the only solution I’ve come up with that doesn’t make it easy for image searchers to use my photos without having to put a little elbow grease of their own into it or risk looking like a thief. I’ve found that more often than not, copyrights mean nothing to image searchers. I’ve even heard some people say they think that Google image search is a free-for-all to take images off the web.
Yes, it is a great idea to watermark your photos/images with a copyright symbol, your name, and or your website URL. This is good for business.
I save a lot of photos/image to my computer just because I love the photo and want to look at it again and again. Or because I get color ideas from the image or design ideas. I like it when the image owner places their URL on the image because then I can remember to visit their site again.
Not everyone that downloads an image will use it to break a copyright law, but yes I understand that many, many people will.
I use Google image search to look for photos of whatever I am researching. Good photos many times leads to good text content too.
Say I want info on horse hoof problems. I can use the Google image search for “split hoof” and find clear photos of this subject which then leads me to the web page that talks about this problem and has photos too. I am a visual person and I understand things best when they are illustrated.
But, yes, I agree, I do think a lot of people do use Google image search for stealing images, but not everyone.
Thanks for another great tip, Chris!
I have an image in every single post or page on my site. I thought of just how much work that’ll be to add all that stuff and wondered if there isn’t a plugin out there that does that. I searched a little and found exactly - that! It’s called SEO Friendly Images and works great. Thought I’d share that!
Yes, This a great information. I was wondering for its. i had little idea about this. Now i can do this with complete information. Thanx for this Image Search Optimization.
Hoot and/or Holler ↓