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How to promote images in Google
Published: October 24, 2006
Promoting websites and pages in Google is relatively straight forward as there's a wealth of information about how to do that including my article on search engine optimisation. Although hard work, there are guidelines and best practice routes to follow to get good, organic listings. But, what about getting images ranked?
Getting images ranked in Google requires a lot of associative text.
The example we are going to reproduce is a particular image on this site that is constantly being leeched by forums and chat rooms.
The above link should give you the picture on this site as it's #1 result. Although it's only a small result set, the same methods of associative text apply.
What does associative text mean?
There is a checklist of rules that we need to adhere to in order to gain rank for our image.
- Image name should contain the keyword
- The
altattribute should contain the keyword - The title of the web page should contain the keyword
- Headings in the page should contain the keyword
- Tip: If the image is within a paragraph, ensure one of the surrounding words is the keyword
The checklist above is a means of doing what you can to assist the search engines 'get it' when it comes to images. You still need traditional SEO techniques to get the containing page ranked though.
What about linking to the image?
This is one of the often overlooked aspects of promoting images. If you link to an image, like: "Keane in Hastings" you can certainly fast track a lot of the identification process. As regular readers know, the clickable text in links is one of the best means of describing and ranking web resources, even images.
Useful?
Assistance?
Comments
Simon says:
Clive Walker says:
How would you rate each factor in order of importance? I would assume that the image name is most important followed by linking to the image using the keywords.
And how would you name an image with more than one keyword? Using hyphens between each word or underscore?
Handy - thanks. I have wondered about this in the past.