"Crushing It" On Google Images - Image Search SEO

Information on how to optimize images for Google Image Search, plus some other cool tips and tricks...

The Aha Moment

This article was inspired when I found a page I designed at no.1 on Google for the term "akshobya mandala free image". As you can see if you follow the link, the page was specifically designed to host a downloadable / embeddable mandala picture.

However, despite the fact that my page was at number one in "regular Google", the image itself did not appear AT ALL in the Google image search results for the search "akshobya mandala"!

This was a priceless discovery to me - and provided a fantastic insight into the fact that search engine optimization (SEO) for Google images works completely differently to ordinary SEO.

So I examined the page I had coded, in order to learn what I could.

My image contained the keyword in the image url (i.e. akshobya-mandala-msp.jpg) - but I realised that I had left the keyword out of the alt attribute in the <a href> tag ( I had used alt="may all beings be happy" as this text appears in the image). Also the keyword was not in the <td> that contained the image; this factor is said by others to be very important in getting an image to rank.

A few code changes was all it took...

So I rewrote the code for the <td> in question - and what did I find? I'd hit the jackpot!! Returning to the page a couple of months later.... my image was at number one in Google images for my search term!

Note that I did not do any link building. There were no links whatsoever from external sites to the image file itself - and the page that contained the image was simply linked from elsewhere in the site.

Here is the old version of the <td> : image DID NOT APPEAR AT ALL in Google image search results, despite the fact that the page it came from ranked no.1 in Google for the term "akshobya mandala free image":

Here is the New version of the <td> :

<td valign=top align=center >
Akshobya Mandala free image: <IMG SRC="images/myspace/akshobya-mandala-msp.jpg" WIDTH="451" HEIGHT="500" style="border: 1px #0099ff solid;" alt="akshobya mandala" title="akshobya mandala"> 
Akshobya Mandala by Zotec</td>

First Conclusions:

Now obviously, this is not a "high competition" term. However, we can see clearly that the alt attribute is of critical importance in ranking for Google images. The keyword in the image name is at least partially irrelevant to Google - at least, if it is not in also the alt attribute. Maybe if it has both, it scores big, but if the alt="keyword" is not there, nada.

This would make some sense when you observe that most images are titled "IMG001.jpg" or something - and that the alt attribute is the primary piece of information used to identify images. It is the default text for browsers that don't display images, or when an image link is broken. It's obvious why a low "score" would be given to the image title.

I would also go so far as to guess that there may be additional points scored for an "exact match" on the alt attributes, rather than just containing the relevant keyword - but this is speculation.

The other critical factor appears to be including the keyword in the same or <td> tag as the image - especially if it is denoted as bold ( ) or .

Appearance of the keyword outside of the <td> that the image contains seem fairly irrelevant. The page url, title tag, H1 and body text all contained the keyword from the outset - but this seems to have no effect if the term is not in the alt, and the same paragraph or td as the image.

For now, I got my page to the top of the image search results simply with some "on-page SEO" and without doing any link building. For more popular images, I'd imagine that link building is the next step. But let's explore a little further and see if this has any validity.

Further Research into Google Images

In order to form stronger conclusions, I needed to do some further investigation into image search - and the relationship between image search results and link-building to those images. I also wanted to be more sure that my results weren't one-offs.

First, I typed in the phrase "sphere" into both Google image results and Google main search. The conclusions are immediately obvious:

•The page that came in at no. 1 out of 6,950,000 in image results [it's still there in Dec 2009!] was not in the top 500 pages for the regular Google search for the same term!!

•Page was PR4 on an overall domain of pr9 ( www.gnu.org ).

•There were only 7 backlinks to the actual page that hosted the image, 6 of which were from the same domain, and all 7 just had the URL as anchor text. But using our beloved friend Yahoo Site Explorer (this tool is amazing) - we can examine which pages hotlink the image file i.e. link directly to the image file in order to embed it in their own pages (this is really useful also if you want to see who is swiping your bandwidth!)

Links "except from this domain" are around 33 in number. As for on-site SEO: The page has no meta-tags at all, search term doesn't appear in <TITLE> or <H1> tags. No CSS, just tags - also 23 html errors on the page when run through BBEdit's document syntax check!

Anyway, here's the code from the site in question - reproduced of course for educational purposes:

<img src="graphics/sphere.png"
alt="[Sphere]." />
 
Sphere

The search term also appeared in the <H2> tag for the section in which the image appeared - and this H2 was linked from the list of contents at the top of the document in a typical manner - using <a href="#Sphere"> Sphere</a> in the TOC and <a name="Sphere"> Sphere</a> at the the section title

I think we can safely conclude from this that image search results and text search results use an entirely different algorithm. We can also see that competing for images is going to be much, much simpler. There's less traffic altogether of course - but much less competition as less people even bother getting this right. I am sure that most will never optimize for image searches. Even the sites that reach the top seem as though they did so almost "accidentally".

This information is gold! It should enable you to crush Google images - and simply going through all your existing pages and optimising for Google images should yield some results.

Also - be sure to remove all the irrelevant image alt attributes from navigation buttons etc. Use alt="".

One thing to note is that by optimizing for Google Images you inadvertently encourage people to steal your image content - as this is what a lot of people use google images for. However, if you emply a "code grab box" (one of the strategies described in full in the Link Building Black Book) you deliberately encourage people to grab the image, and this also gives you a backlink.

*******

Another images search: Synthesizer (over 2.1 million results)

The winning site - Page has alexa rank of 850,000, PR1, no big deal at all. 20 inbound links from other sites to the image, only 2 to the page that contains it - and not even a checkmate tag! But pretty good.

<center>Tone2 Firebird Screenshot 
<img alt="Tone2 Firebird Synthesizer" title="Tone2 Firebird Synthesizer"
src="http://www.kaosaudio.com/images/software/tone2-firebird-synthesizer.jpg" />

Keyword synthesizeralso occurred in H1, H2, title, URL, meta description and a few times in text. Not in meta keywords. The only large image on the page.

The number 2 spot: Alexa 72,960 (sequencer.de, authority synth site! )

Keyword in H1, not in H2, not in URL, in meta description and keywords, absolutely loads in text. Lots of images on the page.

The number 3 spot: Alexa 3,160,401 (roland.co.nz)

Keyword in H1, H2 tags, not in url, not in any meta, very little text. There are only 28 backlinks to the site altogether and none to this jpg or page!

Experiment time!

Ok I have posted an image of a synthesizer over at synthlearn.com - using my image code tweaks as above. Synthlearn.com is one of my sites; (this site is embarrasingly basic and incomplete at the moment - but that doesn't matter right now.) The date is Dec 14th 2009 - let's see what happens!

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That's all folks! If you liked this, be sure to check out the Link Building Black Book.

-- Alex Newman

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