Many sites have bogged down their sites with images and have seen that their image searches have boded to nothing.
This is not that the images are bad, but that the image search optimisation has been poorly done in many cases.
One other problem that had bogged down many sites is having the images stored in a photo silo and never reaping the rewards that can be made with having the images stored on site.
A number of search engine robots will place a value on the images that are on the site. Yet the best image will mean nothing if the robot never sees the value of the image.
This is where the keywords that are associated to the pictures and their placement is paramount. This may sound daunting to some, yet is something that is rather easy to comprehend and set up.
The spidering technique that many robots use will place importance of the keywords not in the general text and how it associated to the picture, but the direct association that is part of the picture and also the location of the picture within the site itself.
This is the fundamental flaw that some sites have had that has made them lower on the list for the image searches that have made even the most simple of websites excel.
First and foremost in image searching is the name of the image. This plays a rather large part of the keyword searches that are performed on images and something that many sites have just started to become aware of.
Many sites will focus on part of the keyword phrase or just a keyword, but the ones that have wrought out the best results have been able to use a full key phrase in the images and still been able to make the images distinct for loading of the page.
Metadata is one factor that has just been recently recognized as a resource in image searches. Many see the metadata as the signature that is unique to files.
This is something that has made image searches that much more useful as part of the metadata is a description that can be associated to the image directly.
Some sites will place a simple name here or title, yet others have been able to place a small description with multiple keywords within one simple description.
This has made the image not just ideal to the primary search, but also have the potential of other keyword image searches as well.
Perhaps the one factor that is the easiest to overlook is location. This is where the file is located on the server. The robot will place a value in which folders the image is placed.
This doesn’t mean that the pictures should be tied to the root directory, but that the folders the images are in should have the keyword in their names.
This has a lesser value in the ratings, but any edge can make all the difference in an image search and help ensure that an image is on top.
