Image optimization for e-commerce

[triplelootz]

Regarding image optimization for an ecommerce site.
In your "category" pages you list your products with a small thumbnails / miniature image. When the user clicks on the product name or on the thumnails, he lands on the product page with the real size product image.

How do you optimize the thumbnail image?

• Do you use a different ALT?
• Is Google smart enough to index the real size image?

On one hand the image located on the "product" page has lot more content around, is bigger & more interesting for both the user and Google. On the other hand the "category" page has more autority ( links) than the product page...

To reformulate my questions:

• Do you think ALT tag is important for your thumbnail image on your category pages.
• Do you write different ALT tag for your thumbnail image ( on your category pages) & and your real size image (on your product page)?
• Which ALT tag / image do you think is the most interesting for Google?

What do you think?

Cheers,

Ludo

[mickey11]

If what you are asking is how to optimize the image so it does well in google image search, then best way is to put a caption under the image you want to appear in the image search Google pays attention to about the next 70 characters following the image on the html/php page.

so if you want to rank well for brown bowling shoes in image search

simply put brown bowling shoes on the html/php page right after the image, also use brown bowling shoes it the alt attribute of the image , this will especially help if the image is clickable. It sort of counts like anchor text of the image.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Ludo

Have you read Marketing in the Age of Google by Vanessa Fox? There is a great chapter in that book about image optimisation for e-commerce. It is not really a technical discussion and it would seem you know about that but rather it is a guideline to help you convert image search results (or image results in the blended results) into useful traffic.

The main push is that when someone clicks on the image to visit your site that they land on a page that clearly signposts what they need to do from there.

There is a pretty good post about this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/is-optimizing-photos-more-important-than-you-think

The Vanessa fox book is well worth picking up though as well!

Hope it helps

Marcus