6 Simple Ways to Boost Your Visibility on Google Images
Image optimization is among the most easily manageable yet disregarded strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
We often neglect even the simplest image optimization practices and usually waste the chance to bring in easy traffic to our websites.
How Google Images Works?
In order to show up on Google, images hosted on public and searchable websites go through:
- Crawling
Google crawls billions of webpages to extract available images — essentially searching for the <img> HTML tag. The “alt” and “src” attributes are also considered.
- Indexing
During indexing, all crawled images are organized into specific and general categories.
- Ranking
Google then returns the best possible images for a particular searcher’s query or phrase.
On the image search result pages, it also displays extra information from every image’s source using additional metadata i.e., structured data it has extracted.
Image Optimization for Search
To optimize the content for search engines, you should:
- Make sure search engines can access your web pages and its content.
- Create and optimize the content.
- Create, add and optimize metadata on your web pages.
Here are some simple ways to do better on Google Images:
1. Robots’ Access:
Make sure your website images are accessible to the Googlebot. You can check whether your images are accessible to Googlebot using Google’s free tools such as:
- Mobile-Friendly Test.
- Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool.
Test a few of your URLs in the Mobile-Friendly Test to see if Googlebot can access your pages. This includes image URLs you can find in the IMG tags’ “src” attribute.
If they are not, it’s usually because of your robots.txt file that blocks search engines’, or even just Google’s, access to images.
2. Image Sitemap
In most of the cases, images are injected with JavaScript, which delays the discovery of said files. You can avoid this by using image sitemaps which are an extension of standard sitemaps.
Most likely, your website already has a sitemap. What you need to do is add additional information to your current sitemap about where the images of each page on your website are located.
Traditionally, Googlebots’ main discovery method is by following the links, including images, from the HTML of pages.But as the web becomes more JavaScript-heavy, image sitemaps will help the Googlebot enormously with the discovery process.
Faster the Googlebot discovers the images on your site, faster these images can show up in Google Images and the sooner you can get traffic to your website.
3. Include Descriptive Text Near the Image
When indexed the text around the images are used to learn what the image is all about. And, if there’s no text on the page then Google will have a hard time identifying what the image is showing.
So, make sure that the descriptive text around the image is available and it’s. This can be a caption or descriptive text within your article.
4. Use Alt Attribute
You should add an alt attribute whenever possible to accurately and concisely describe the image that you’re showing on your page.This task is on highest priority in the list in terms of annotating images as this can help a lot with ranking.
The alt attribute should always describe what your image is showing. Do not use it to insert the query or phrase that you want this image to rank for. Stay away from spammy techniques!
5. Structured Data
Adding structured data may result in having your images badged and stand out in image search.
If you have an e-commerce website, add markup to your product pages. This will enable Google to display detailed product data in Google Images.
Remember; use structured data that is actually relevant to the page and images.
6. Metadata
You can also make good use of HTML tags to describe what your image is about.
Other Takeaways
- Photo Metadata
Google doesn’t currently read EXIF metadata for categorization purposes. However, it now supports IPTC photo metadata to display the image credits.
- Image File Name
Using a descriptive file name for the images is helpful but not a large requirement, unlike the alt attribute.
- Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a way to speed up the website — specifically the image-heavy pages.
When a user loads an image-heavy webpage, the browser has to synchronously load every single image.The user ends up waiting for every single image to download regardless if they’ll actually scroll into position to see that actual image.
With lazy loading, you use JavaScript to load the images that are in the viewport.
Conclusion
We hope the above tips will help you understand how to boost your visibility in Google Images search results!
If you are lucky enough to have high-ranking already, then make the most of it! Amplify your content, boost its engagement metrics, and earn valuable backlinks. And, if you have a Wikipedia profile, try uploading copyright-free images that meet Wikipedia’s guidelines.
Ultimately, an effective image campaign needs a multi-pronged approach that includes many of the above tips. There is no shortcut to SEO — whether images or text — and your success will totally depend on how well you leverage your own unique opportunities.
