Optimizing my images to appear on Google Images
-
My website ranks at the top for my keywords, but my images barely show up on Google Images. I'm renaming them, tagging them, I'm not sure what else I can possibly do. Any suggestions? Thanks!
-
So I have always renamed my file before uploading it. But what I realized is that while I was occasionally filling in the "title, alt text, description" I was not doing that consistently. I have started going back into my media library and filling that information in. As I have thousands of pictures on my sites, it will take some time, but I'm hoping that will fix my issue.
I would also love to know if title, alt text and description should be the same. My gut says "no" because Google would likely see that as "spammy." I'm certain I could be wrong though. Would love to hear from others.
-
Thought I'd just ask again in hope someone might see the question that has had experience with this:
_"When using Wordpress (or similar) are all the Media fields needed to be filled out? _
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?"
-
Anyone had experience with this?
-
We've found (and I'd love someone else to verify this) that there is some invisible meta data in JPEGs when they are first created. The name of the JPEG before it's placed in a site seems to have a significant effect on rankings in some cases. Have a play with some meta data editors and see if that makes a difference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_metadata_editors
-
When using Wordpress (or similar) are all the Media fields needed to be filled out?
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?
-
When using wordpress are all the Media fields needed to be filled out?
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?
-
Well I would argue that the images I have posted are kick-ass, so I'm guessing that's not my issue.
-
Thank you Tim.
How can I tell if my site has an image sitemap already?
-
Kickass images are the best optimization.
-
How could make website rank so high but not the images? Seems like both should be ranking about the same, no?
-
Yep, they are being indexed.
I also see your work for https://www.google.com/search?q=Indianapolis+Baby+Photography&source=lnms&tbm=isch
It could just be an authority issue... you need to strengthen your website authority (get more backlinks) in order to rank your pictures higher.
-
Thank you Oleg.
So when I put this in Google and click on the image results, I get a TON of my pictures. I think that means Google is indexing my images, would that be true?
Here's the "this" I referred to: site:lseverson.com newborn photography
-
Yes, it may be over optimized. First off, make sure the images are being indexed (search for site:yourdomain.com + keyword in image search).
Since most of your images are so similar, you should add more descriptive terms (clothing, scenery, lighting, ethnicity, baby synonyms (toddler, infant, newborn, etc)) so that google doesn't think you are just stuffing keywords.
-
Thank you Tim.
How can I tell if my site has an image sitemap already?
-
Have you considered also adding an image sitemap.xml to your site to make it easier for Google to crawl all of the files you want etc. You could use something like Screaming Frog to generate one for you.
-
Thank you Oleg!
Unfortunately, I do ALL those things and I still can't seem to get my images to appear. I am a photographer, so I use the word "portrait" "photography" "photographer" as well as "newborn" and "baby" and maybe it thinks I'm keyword stuffing. But the reality is just about every picture I display is a "newborn baby picture" or "baby photograph." Is it possible that Google thinks I'm trying to spam it by using these words over and over, even if they are words that accurately describe what's in the image?
-
Make sure...
- file name contains keywords
- wherever you use the image, make sure the alt text and title text is keyword friendly
- the image appears on a page that is relevant to the main keywords
- the text surrounding the image (e.g. caption) gives the image more context as well
Don't worry about exif/meta data.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google authorship what am i doing wrong
Hi, i am using google authorship on my site but when i use the testing tool it is not working. before the upgrade we had it working fine but now it does not seem to work. we have our google plus account pointing to the site and the writer we are trying to add is not coming up on the tool here is the code we are putting on the page Google+ and the page in question is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/emmerdale/emmerdale-laurel-is-determined-to-take-action when i check the tool i get the following Authorship Testing ResultAuthorship is not working for this webpage.andAuthorship rel=author MarkupCannot verify that rel=author markup has established authorship for this webpage.the tool i am using to check is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippetsany help to solve this problem would be great. i am using joomla
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
CDN Being Crawled and Indexed by Google
I'm doing a SEO site audit, and I've discovered that the site uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that's being crawled and indexed by Google. There are two sub-domains from the CDN that are being crawled and indexed. A small number of organic search visitors have come through these two sub domains. So the CDN based content is out-ranking the root domain, in a small number of cases. It's a huge duplicate content issue (tens of thousands of URLs being crawled) - what's the best way to prevent the crawling and indexing of a CDN like this? Exclude via robots.txt? Additionally, the use of relative canonical tags (instead of absolute) appear to be contributing to this problem as well. As I understand it, these canonical tags are telling the SEs that each sub domain is the "home" of the content/URL. Thanks! Scott
Technical SEO | | Scott-Thomas0 -
Google Analytics
I usually have Google analytics "real-time" running on one of my monitors, occasionally I glance at the screen to see that are TOP KEYWORDS people are using, lately there have been a lot of long-tail keywords. If I try to copy and paste the queries into google, i can never seem to find us organically for the long-tail searches? Is the real-time feature accurate? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TP_Marketing0 -
Site being indexed by Google before it has launched
We are currently coming towards the end of a site migration, and are at the final stage of testing redirects etc. However, to our horror we've just discovered Google has started indexing the new site. Any ideas on how this could have happened? I have most recently asked for robots.txt to exclude anything with a certain parameter in URL. Is there a chance this, wrongly implemented, could have caused this?
Technical SEO | | Sayers0 -
Google Search memory
Hi we have had the following statement from a member of our Japan office with regards google displaying search results, would anyone be able to give us a definitive answer on this. Google remembers previous non-mobile related searches For example, we already know that we come up on the first page if you select “kaigai keitai” (mobile phone for use abroad) and “UK” where as we don’t for searches where you replace the UK with the US or other countries. This means that if a customer, for example, does a search just on the UK e.g. using words like UK travel, London, millennium dome, etc. and then does a separate search just using the words “kaigai keitai” that google could show us as a link on the first page. However, if an individual did a search on Paris, France, Eiffel Tower, and then did a search for “kaigai keitai”, our link might not appear on the page. I don’t know if we have tested this already, but Google seems to have a very long “memory” and I could see this kind of aspect of Google resulting in us missing significant business from people going to the US, France, Italy, etc. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | -Al-0 -
Image search and CDNs
Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength. Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain. Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength? Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools? Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Google plus
With Google search plus your world, would i see results ONLY from Google plus followers ? or from someone who is my facebook friend as well.
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Google Penalize?
Hello, I read an statement somewhere which stated: "2 identical URLs linked to 2 different popular key phrases next to each other (on the same website/domain) will lead to a Google penalize. Google knows, that both terms are popular. This means, Google will ignore the links to your site (you'll not have any benefit) and the site you have your links on loses authority." What are your thoughts on this statement? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | micfo0