It is essential to optimise your images for Google Image Search because, without the required modifications, none of the search engines will be able to identify and index your pictures in their image results. Google Image Search, which is often overlooked by many marketers, quickly minimises all searches made on Facebook, Google Maps, Amazon, and Youtube combined according to Moz and Jumpshot results.
The most significant web resource in search engine optimisation is Google Search at 59.3 percent, followed by Google Photos at 26.79 percent. Google Image searches are conducted ten times more often than Yahoo and Bing’s daily searches combined.
Before you start optimising the results of your images in search results, make sure that you check your keywords or company name using incognito or private mode in your browser to get the most accurate search results.
What Is SEO? How Does Google Index Images?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation, where optimisation means making your website content or, in this case, images rank higher in the search results that are listed by search engines. You have to meet certain demands and use specific techniques that make your web pages and images acceptable to search engine indexing requirements.
For web pages, it is essential that they:
- Load quickly
- Offer value to users
- Contain keywords naturally
- Have keyword-rich and search-relevant titles
- Link to credible websites/platforms via backlinks
The idea for high-level images is pretty similar, but the criteria for higher-level images is somewhat different than others.
When it comes to ranking images, search engines want to rank them based on their relevance to the contents of the page they are on, these include:
- The name of the image file
- The caption of the image
- The PageRank
- The quality of the image
- And more
In short, you’re going to have to work on a lot of things to optimise your search engine images. Here are some ideas to help you rank high on search engine image searches.
What Does Google Do In Order To Find Your Images And Display Them In Its Search Results ?
How Google Crawls Your Site For Google image search
Google crawls billions of web pages to reveal their available images
– simply looking for the HTML tag < img > helps them locate and display them.
How Does Google Indexing work?
Once Google has crawled your site’s images it then organises them into general and specific categories and displays them in accordance with the relevant search phrases if they are optimised properly.
How Google Ranks The Images It Displays In Its Search Results?
When users of google type in a particular search query, Google returns the best images possible for that search. It also displays more information from the source of each image on the result pages of the image search using additional metadata (i.e., structured data) that it has extracted from the image.
Adding Images To Articles
When used correctly, your photos and images will help your readers to understand your articles better. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an old saying but it probably doesn’t apply to Google. It is, however, definitely true when you decide to spice up 1,000 boring words, explain what you mean in a graphic, flow chart diagram, infographic or slideshow to ensure your images and content are more appealing to both humans and google images.
To make them more appealing, you should add photos to every article you write. What’s more, because visual search is becoming increasingly relevant, it could turn out that adding them to your articles could give you a pleasant bit of traffic. Getting visual content means you can probably also make the picture SEO a little higher on your to-do list, whether it’s in guest posts for your articles or on your blog.
When Writing Guest Posts Always Include Profile Pictures
When it comes to guest blogs, people often pay more attention to the bio when they are accompanied by the author’s image. It makes sense to have a photo with your bio. For personal products, an image is just like a logo, i.e. people associate you with a smile. That’s why you need to use it as much as you can and whenever you can. Some of the world’s most popular bloggers and personal brands also use their images on their blogs because they know that their face is the emblem of their brand. Take a look at Harsh Agrawal’s Should Me Loud blog and scroll from top to bottom, and you’ll find his image four times on the same post.
Rename Your Images Metadata, Title & Alt Tags
Image Titles
You’re going to have to title your files properly first. You should title/file name your photos based on the keywords or content that are relevant to them. Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names for your images. This will help Google understand what the image is about and how it should be indexed.
Captioning Images
Just like file names and alt tags, you should also provide a caption under the image and try to include keywords and content-relevant terms in the caption in addition to using relevant, high-quality images that are related to the content on your website. This will help Google understand the context of your images and how they should be indexed.
Alt Tags
Use alt text to describe the content of your images. This text is used by screen readers to describe images to visually impaired users, and it is also used by Google to understand the content of your images. It’s best to keep them concisely descriptive. Don’t fill them with too many keywords, but rather, explain the picture in the best way possible, especially if it’s not an explainer image but rather a photo of a place or activity. Say what you see.
Adding Structured Image Data To Your Pages
It can help search engines like Google images view your images as rich results if you add structured data to your pages. Though Google claims structured data doesn’t help you rank higher, it does help to make your image listings in Image Search more ironed out. But there’s more. For example, if you have recipes on your site and add you decide to add structured data to those images. Google will add a badge to your pictures that indicate that this image belongs to a recipe, this makes people more likely to click your image if they are looking for a recipe than someone else’s image which may not indicate that. Google Images supports the following types of structured data:
- Video
- Products
- Recipe
Google has a range of guidelines that you need to follow if you want your photos to look image-rich. The key lesson is that the image attribute is mandatory and should be crawlable and indexable to your images. Many of Google’s Structured Data General Guidelines can be found here.
Image Sitemaps
Use image sitemaps to give Google information about the images on your website. An image sitemap is a special file that you can create and submit to Google to help it discover and index your images.
Create A Google My Business Page & Add Photos To Your Google Maps Listing
If you’re a person looking to place your brand or a company with a global footprint, getting a Google My Business page will give you a great competitive advantage in Google Search. Google likes it when you use its tools. However, the most important thing is to add images to Google Maps by listing your company there. With your business listed on Google Maps, customer feedback and ratings will be indicated every time your business appears in the search results.
Add Images To Your Social Networking Pages
Establishing business pages and personal profiles on social networking websites is already somewhat necessary, so it is helpful to have photos on all of those pages and profiles. Often your official business website may not be among the top search results, but your social networking accounts may show up.
Make sure you have your personal or company image in the profile as this will give you an identity online immediately.
Twitter is a great place to get image exposure and a great way to market to people your actual products and services. You can utilise tools like hastagify.me to find out what’s popular, and what’s trending so you can add the best hashtags to go with your images and posts. If you’re a local business looking for local customers then you can also tag your location on your twitter posts, these images may or may not appear in Google image search results, but if a potential customer searches on twitter for a specific hashtag, location, business or service type, then you might just pop up before their eyes. This is a great way to market for free on Twitter.
Photos on your Facebook pages and posts should be optimised to the correct size for Facebook posts. They should be tagged with a location if you are a local business and should be hashtagged with your keywords and maybe also a few trending keywords just to get your interactions up. Your profile image should be of your face or logo dependant upon whether you are a brand or if you’re promoting yourself or your own personal job role. Add your link to posts and photos and write compelling posts to your audience.
Pinterest is a very useful took for backlinks and for sharing images, by pinning images from your site directly to your companies twitter profile you are creating a backlink when you share a lot of images, other people will repin them. This builds another social signal and backlink, thus thrusting your main image on your site up in the google search rankings. Be sure to add in the best keywords and locations to the images you pin from your sites to get the best results. Pinterest, in our view, is one of the most powerful ways to rank an image on google image search results.
Images on Slideshare Rank Well On Google Images
Slideshare is part of LinkedIn’s network. The positive thing about SlideShare is that the slides you make on the platform display the results of the search engine as jpg images. How well your images perform in image searches and Google images depends on the number of viewers. The more people view a specific picture, the higher the image results are.
How To Find The Right Images To Use?
Search engines want pages of high quality to be rewarded for their efforts as opposed to copied content and standard stock images. Google discourages sites where neither the photos nor the text is original. This can be seen in its image best practices help page. A good tip is to take your own pictures or edit stock images and graphics yourself using applications or sites like Canva.
It’s essential to note that you must respect copyrights, licensing fees and/or trademark laws when you use pictures from elsewhere. Google also provides support for crediting photos to the required author and rights holder. This can be done in the metadata. It will then be visible by clicking ‘image Credits’ where available.
Make Sure The Images You Use Are Relevant To The Content They Represent
Create, choose or design images that are useful for the page’s underlying message. That may be a chart, a graph, a suitable image or something else. Note that search engines tend to rank a picture if it is on a web page that fulfils the purpose of the searcher and has the most relevant content.
It’s also a good thing to remember that while your images might rank. If the image has SEO that does not fit the search term, viewers will avoid clicking on it so it’s essential that you put your message or relevant products, services or content representation on the images and not just keyword any old thing you can find available for reuse.
What File Format Should Your Images Have?
One of the most basic parts on image SEO is ensuring you use a file format that search engines can index. Second to this is using a file format that loads in relatively good times, so the user doesn’t get tired of waiting for your whole web page to load properly before scrolling through it. The file format you choose will either positively or negatively affect the quality and download speed of your site, and it’s images, so both are important factors to consider before saving and adding image files to your site. The three most common image formats used on the internet today are:
- PNG
- JPG or JPEG
- GIF
Another type of image file that’s becoming more and more popular because of its small file size is SVG’s. SVG stands for scalable vector graphic – they are great for logos, and the size can be increased and decreased to any size without the image quality decreases.
Next Generation Image Formats
What on earth are these I hear you ask, well these new next-gen image formats can ensure your images load super duper fast, have better file compressions, are much better quality, load much faster, and take less data to download and load on mobile devices?.
These new next-gen files are known as:
- JPEG-XR
- JPEG 2000
- WebP
If you’re hoping to convert images to have to any of the above files then at present, its possible to convert your existing image files to WebP by using an online image converter like Convertio.
Pay Attention To Your Actions
Overall, the key to getting your images indexed and ranking on Google Image search is to provide as much information and context as possible, so that Google can understand the content and relevance of your images. By following the best practices outlined above, you can improve your chances of success and increase your visibility on Google Image search.
You need to pay attention to the quality of your content, no matter how many photos you upload. Just uploading photos without tagging, naming and labelling them properly will not benefit you in any way. Continue to integrate the tips provided above and optimise your photos without losing patience. It will take some time before you see any clear results, but when you continue to upload properly optimised images, you will start seeing them appear in the Google Image search results which are extremely satisfying, even for the most experienced of SEO experts.
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