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07.19.10 The Best Practices For Image SEO  By Geoff Simon The purpose of this post is to review best practices for image search, also to inform people who haven't heard, you can now include images in your XML sitemaps. For up to 1,000 image you can add per page, I will point you to the resource on Google and also provide the syntax and required and optional fields that you can use when adding images to your sitemap. Google has come a long way when it comes to the type of media that it can index and serve up on the results pages of Google Searches. This is just another step that Google has taken to improve the user experience and help people find what they are looking for, regardless of the medium. Now, from Google's standpoint, they want image search to be useful to their audience so what they recommend here in terms of best practices are the following recommendations: • Good Quality Photos - Resist the temptation to post blurry and unclear images. There are a ton of images out there and if you want people to see yours, you better make sure they are clear and crisp. Crisp clear images are also more likely to translate in to crisp clear images when Google thumbnails them in the search results, so users are more likely to click on the clear image than the blurry image (if it shows up at all). • Make a Separate Page for Each Image - By creating a stand alone page for each image on your site, even if it already appears in a few places, allows you to consolidate all the information about that image on one page. This helps Google figure out what the image is about. If you do this Google suggests that you include unique information about your image including descriptive titles and captions; on each page. You can also enable comments, ratings or other interactive elements about the image on this page. • Image placement on the Page - Place your images high up on your page. Not everyone scrolls to the bottom of the page, so make sure your image is above the fold (ATF) where it can be immediately seen. • Image Directory Structure - Try and consolidate your related images together, this could mean segmenting them by size, by geographic location (if your in the travel business, for instance), by food item (if it happens to be a recipe or food related site). I order a lot of food online from Lou's to Go, which delivers Deep Dish Chicago Pizza, Italian Beef Sandwich kits, Poppy seed buns, Vienna beef hot dogs, Carson's Ribs, etc. Wow, my mouth started to water a bit. Anyway, use the convention that makes the most sense for your site. So for instance Lou's could put pizzas in one directory, beef sandwich images in another, Vienna beef hot dog kits in another and so on. • Specify Width & Height - For each image you want to make sure that you include in the IMG SRC the size of the image. This helps because a page can begin to be rendered even before the image is loaded, but only if it knows what area to warden off for the images on the page. Adding this to your image syntax will help speed up your load times and provide a better user experience. Provide Good Context for Your Images The page the image is on and the content around the image including captions, titles all help Google determine what your image is about. The example given is an image of a polar bear on a page about tomatoes. This could send mixed signals to Google about the subject matter of polarbear.jpg. Continue reading this article.
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