Tips -- how to do Image optimization for search engines.

Hello DP
Here I have seen lots of people asking how to optimize image which inspired me to write this thread. Use tips depending on your website model.

1. Use keywords in image name.
2. Include keyword in the image ALT tag. Do not use only keywords make ALT tag descriptive.
3. Optimize pages which contain image.
4. Limit number of image per page.
5. Content near image very important and should be supporting image and keyword rich.
6. Add photo to shearing sites such as flickr, Google map, etc.
7. Use supporting URL for image. I.e. directory in which image placed, image name.
8. Use caption of image. Make caption descriptive.
9. Use .jpg format for image.
10. Use good quality image.
11. Get email subscribers for image feed.

I would like to hear what you say. You can add to the list if you know some more things about image optimization.

 

hm.... all i woulda thought u need to do is add ALT tags. Any image I use only gets a nice ALT tag

I might look into a few of these things..... (well like 1 the rest is basic knowledge and/or stupid )

 

Strongly disagree.

Some images are compressed better using GIF or PNG. And SE robots have no difference or difficulties in reading them. JPG, GIF, and PNG have been web standard for years (decades maybe). Only 5ft grade robots that could not "read" them.

 

Jpeg is usually the best quality to filesize ratio.

 

Hi, im sorry, i do not understand number 11., what do you mean?

Beside that, the list is great !

Thanks.

 

I strongly disagree too... Why .jpg only? all images can be optimized....

 

jpg is ually the best quality to filesize ratio. In most cases a 100kb jpg will look the same as a 500kb gif. There are some cases where gif or png are more suitable but generally for web images jpg is best.

 

Better if the photos are hosted in your own host

Disagree, PNG and GIFs are also needed for image optimization, how about the ones who offer animated gifs?

 

But how does .jpg affect ranking?

 

If you use;

1. Use keywords in image name.

you should not use keywords in

2. Include keyword in the image ALT tag. Do not use only keywords make ALT tag descriptive.

but try to replace your ALT tag keywords with synonyms in a descriptive text, not too long. Works fine, specially on Yahoo

 

I've never seen a large (1mb+) filesize image ranking in Google image search.

 

good tips, i think it's good thing to do aswell

 

I have seen one, but some are very rare, especially if the image is hi-res.

 

True.

However, those some rare cases are not very rare. Vector based images (icons for example) are much more better in GIF then in JPG. In fact some 100 bytes GIF image could be as large as 4,000 bytes (4Kb) in JPG. That's 40 times larger. If you are in the CAD or architecture niche you will know this and mostly use GIF for graphics on your site.

Don't forget that GIF has transparent feature. JPG could never compete with that.

You do detailed seo like h1 tag, alt tag, keyword tag, etc. Why do you leave this one out?

There are. Ton's of them actually in the adult industry. Try to deactivate your filter at Google personalized search.

 

I never see images under 1kb either unless I specifically choose to display 'small images'. So jpg is usually best if you want to appear in the image search results (unless you want transparency).

 

That small image is just an example. It's normal for fav icon. Although .ico is preferable for fav icon.

You guys might meet some sites that although have heavy graphics but loads very fast. It might be the server, but most of the case (from my experiences 60% of them) the webmaster is cleverly exchanging GIF and JPG and the combination of them to get the smallest size and fastest loading page.

In CAD you could find images in GIF that is 100Kb that if converted into JPG could be around 20MB. It's all back to the images themselves.

Of course normally human or animal photos will compressed better at JPG than GIF. But that does not mean we could just generalize that JPG is smaller and better at SEO. There's just no proof or experiments on that as far as I know.

Google Image gives both GIF and JPG the same weight in ranking. I've never seen any data or experiments that says that Google prefers JPG than GIF. It's just most people use JPG thus the results are more than GIF. I've seen many GIFs in the image results.

If you have some data or experiments, please share some, it's always worthwhile to notice how Google acts.

 

Bigger images rank better too!

 

Buy it would only be 30mb if the resolution was something like 4000*3000. As I already said, the images most commonly displayed in the image search results are between 300*300 and 1500*1500, I don't often see images outside of those boundaries. Jpg is usually the best image format for images between those sizes.

 

Thanks for tips, I'll start with some image optimization!

 

Good tips.
There is a great way of getting traffic from Google Image lot of you may already know.