Image optimization for e-commerce
-
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
-
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.
-
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
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
-
Use Nonindex or Canonical on product tags of a e-commerce site
I run a e-commerce site and we have many product tags. These product tags come up as "Duplicate Page Content" when Moz does it's crawl. I was wondering if I should use Nonindex or Canonical? The tags all go to the same product when used so I figure I would just nonindex them but was wondering what's the best for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EmmettButler1 -
Do I have to optimize every page on my site?
Hi guys I run my own photography webstie (www.hemeravisuals.co.uk Going through the process optimizing my page for seo. I have one question I have a few gallery pages with no text etc? Do I still have to optimize these ? Would it rank my site lower if they weren't optimized? And how can i do this sucessfully with little text on these pages ( I have indepth text on these subjects on my services & pricing pages? Kind Regards Cam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hemeravisuals0 -
Keeping E Commerce Product Content Fresh
Hi, Some months ago we created unique content for each of our product descriptions - basically, we removed manufacturers description and made our own unique content. But our content is now, I feel, stale but I'm trying to work out how we can produce fresh content for the product pages and how much is needed for Google to notice the changes? My question is: What does google class as freshness? Would a new photo count? I've always thought that it has to be mainly text content but we do not get that many reviews as our products are not mainstream and it's a small market so are we to create extra bits of text content in the descriptions, and how much?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content. Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page? I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result." My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Images Sitemap GWT - not indexed?
So we went ahead and created an image sitemap of 2387 images, one for each product - I was hoping it would give us better exposure in image results. No joy, over 7 days and they only showing as "sent" but not "indexed". Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Is this over optimization??
I have blog website – packforcity.com, all articles were having almost same title tags (as need of the website) I only change the city name for example What to Wear in Miami in February What To Wear In Dubai In February What To Wear In Budapest In February What to Wear in Beijing in February What to Wear in Los Angeles in January What to Wear in Miami in January What to Wear in Las Vegas in January Is this over optimization?? Before December, My all keywords were ranked on the first page and my old articles still ranked, but my January and February articles (newly posted articles) were ranked No where in Google. Has my website hit by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ross254sidney0 -
Google images directing to Escaped Fragment instead of #!
Our indexed images in Google images are directing to:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CBuy
http://www.cbuy.tv/?escaped_fragment= for example, instead of: the http://www.cbuy.tv/#! version. Is there something we can do on our end to fix this or is this a bug with Google?0 -
Franky hope you like instructions on how to seo image below
How to display image results attached? Please help me why.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imthankyou0