How does this work? The images that are uploaded onto a website are tagged or labelled and this is used by search engines like Google to determine the relevance of the picture to the searches made. Of course it is not that simple. There are other criteria that need to be considered for the total optimization of the images in a webpage.

There are many ways to optimize an image so it would be more likely to be included in Google Image Search result. One very important thing to do is to include keywords or phrases in the image’s Alt text (alt=”keywords here”). Using keywords is a great SEO strategy that could likewise be used for images. Be sure to put key words to your alt text and these keywords should be relevant to the image and to the whole website.

Optimization also entails including keyword enriched title tags and meta tags. SEO specialists know that tags play a big role in the optimization of a particular website. So you need to ensure that the pictures, the title tags and the meta tags contain similar keywords. This would help make the picture rank better in image searches.

The file name of the image also needs to be considered when optimizing images for image searches. Decriptive texts that have the targeted keyword should be used as the title for the picture. Also make sure that this keyword is higly relevant to what the picture is. For example, you would be putting pictures of kitchen designs.The file name should be “kitchen-designs.jpg” instead of usual picture file names that are a combination of letters and numbers like “IMG-0001.jpg”.

The image location in the web page should also be thought through. Ideally, an image should be put in the middle of the text. It would also help if descriptive texts containing the chosen keyword are placed before or after the image.

Another helpful tip is to use the webmaster tools from Google. There are image specific tools there that can be used by anyone. Click on the ‘enhanced picture search’. This could be found in the Diagnostics page. Don’t forget to tick the check box on that page to opt in the picture search on Google. Webmaster Tools can also be used to monitor the images indexed by search engines in a website. Being aware of the number of pictures in your site that is indexed by search engines is important so necessary changes can be made to increase the traffic to the image.

Keeping the picture fresh by changing it every now and then is also helpful. Especially when the website focuses on topics that are highly popular,  try not to have the same images in the site for long. Changing the original pictures and putting up new pictures that are relevant to the key words you have chosen will refresh the images’ rank in the picture search.

Making sure that the images in the web site comply with the Google Images’ standards is also essential. Key points to consider would be the width, height, atl tag and title tag of the picture. All these elements should be within the parameters of the search engine.

Apart from the above mentioned methods, many other steps can be taken to optimize your images for the image searches. Following these steps will help in increasing the number of visitors viewing the images as well as the website itself.

1. Sign up at the Digital Point Forums here: forums.digitalpoint.com. They have a “reviews” section where you can invite other people to give you comments on your site. Digitalpoint is so large that Google indexes it constantly. Google will follow the link you post there to your website.
2. Go to Cubestat.com and punch in the name of your website. Cubestat will create an information page (sort of like an alexa page) about your website that will be indexed by Google in about 20 minutes–and again, Google should follow the link to your website very quickly.  You can also use Statbrain for that. There are about 30 of these such sites, but you’ll have to hire us to get the complete list!
3. Post a Craigslist ad with a link to your website–Google crawls Craigslist constantly, so your link will be picked up quite quickly.
4. Set up an RSS feed on your site and submit it to Feedburner.
5. If your site is a blog, do the following: submit it to BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog, and submit it to Technorati.
6. If your site is a site set up on Wordpress, make sure it is set up to ping Google automatically. To learn how to do this, do a search on this phrase: “wordpress ping automatic google”.
7. Always verify your site with Google webmasters, which is free, here: google.com/webmasters
8. Get a buddy to submit a great post or page to Digg.com
9. Any high-volume forum (similar to Digitalpoint) is going to be crawled by Google quite frequently. Most forums let you have a “signature” where you can post a limited number of links to your site. Also, with signatures, you can return and change the links in your signature once Google has done the indexing.

How NOT to Ever Get Indexed (Stuff NOT to Do):

1. Don’t rely on duplicate content, especially for new sites. Google has filters that identify duplicate content and if it identifies your site as a repository for duplicated content, Google will treat your site as low-value and will not crawl or index quickly (or at all).
2. Directory submission services are generally not a quick strategy for getting indexed.
3. Don’t try hidden keywords or any keyword stuffing: it hasn’t worked since 2001, and Google is very good at detecting it.
4. Don’t try to hammer other blogs with comments–if those are your first few links, it’ll look bad to search engines.

Good luck!

-BusinessWeekOnline

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