Image Search optimization

[webwizard411]

How do you get higher in Google's image search rankings? Since G's crawler is text-only, is high rankings in the filename (or even ALT text)?

webwizard411

[qwerty]

Apparently, the on-page content has a lot to do with it. A site that posted a bunch of my pictures, with a properly descriptive name in the page title, made the mistake of using that title on a bunch of pages containing someone else's pictures as well. Because of that, a search on the name of the person in my pictures brings up those other people's pictures as well.

But I use everything to gain relevance for my images, just in case: file names, alt text, text on the page, page titles.

[rustybrick]

Good question.

It is important that your alt tag (alternative attribute) is descriptive. Also, it helps to name the file with the keywords in them, example given at JimWorld "a picture of a car should be nissan-maxima.gif with the lat tag being Nissan Maxima."

At SEO Chat some members believe that "putting each image in a specifically optimized html page" also helps.

Do you really want traffic from Google Images? Will they convert? That is your call. Just make sure you don't get hit with high bandwidth bills that make the ROI in the red.

[Dodger]

There are also Meta Data tags in the image itself. Well for Jpeg/Tiff images there are. Some of the data it can hold are:

FILE FileName, FileSize, FileDateTime, SectionsFound

COMPUTED html, Width, Height, IsColor and some more if available.

ANY_TAG Any information that has a Tag e.g. IFD0, EXIF, ...

IFD0 All tagged data of IFD0. In normal imagefiles this contains image size and so forth.

THUMBNAIL A file is supposed to contain a thumbnail if it has a second IFD. All tagged information about the embedded thumbnail is stored in this section.

COMMENT Comment headers of JPEG images.

EXIF The EXIF section is a sub section of IFD0. It contains more detailed information about an image. Most of these entries are digital camera related.

Whether image databases store that information is another story. But it would seem to me that if they take the time to pull the image in and create a thumbnail for their results, I do not see them NOT taking advantage of any information that can be extracted from it.