Optimizing my images to appear on Google Images
-
My website ranks at the top for my keywords, but my images barely show up on Google Images. I'm renaming them, tagging them, I'm not sure what else I can possibly do. Any suggestions? Thanks!
-
So I have always renamed my file before uploading it. But what I realized is that while I was occasionally filling in the "title, alt text, description" I was not doing that consistently. I have started going back into my media library and filling that information in. As I have thousands of pictures on my sites, it will take some time, but I'm hoping that will fix my issue.
I would also love to know if title, alt text and description should be the same. My gut says "no" because Google would likely see that as "spammy." I'm certain I could be wrong though. Would love to hear from others.
-
Thought I'd just ask again in hope someone might see the question that has had experience with this:
_"When using Wordpress (or similar) are all the Media fields needed to be filled out? _
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?"
-
Anyone had experience with this?
-
We've found (and I'd love someone else to verify this) that there is some invisible meta data in JPEGs when they are first created. The name of the JPEG before it's placed in a site seems to have a significant effect on rankings in some cases. Have a play with some meta data editors and see if that makes a difference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_metadata_editors
-
When using Wordpress (or similar) are all the Media fields needed to be filled out?
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?
-
When using wordpress are all the Media fields needed to be filled out?
ie. Title, Alt Text, Description?
Would you have all these the same or different? Specially as then when you insert the image into the page you also have Caption on top of the 3 above bits of information?
-
Well I would argue that the images I have posted are kick-ass, so I'm guessing that's not my issue.
-
Thank you Tim.
How can I tell if my site has an image sitemap already?
-
Kickass images are the best optimization.
-
How could make website rank so high but not the images? Seems like both should be ranking about the same, no?
-
Yep, they are being indexed.
I also see your work for https://www.google.com/search?q=Indianapolis+Baby+Photography&source=lnms&tbm=isch
It could just be an authority issue... you need to strengthen your website authority (get more backlinks) in order to rank your pictures higher.
-
Thank you Oleg.
So when I put this in Google and click on the image results, I get a TON of my pictures. I think that means Google is indexing my images, would that be true?
Here's the "this" I referred to: site:lseverson.com newborn photography
-
Yes, it may be over optimized. First off, make sure the images are being indexed (search for site:yourdomain.com + keyword in image search).
Since most of your images are so similar, you should add more descriptive terms (clothing, scenery, lighting, ethnicity, baby synonyms (toddler, infant, newborn, etc)) so that google doesn't think you are just stuffing keywords.
-
Thank you Tim.
How can I tell if my site has an image sitemap already?
-
Have you considered also adding an image sitemap.xml to your site to make it easier for Google to crawl all of the files you want etc. You could use something like Screaming Frog to generate one for you.
-
Thank you Oleg!
Unfortunately, I do ALL those things and I still can't seem to get my images to appear. I am a photographer, so I use the word "portrait" "photography" "photographer" as well as "newborn" and "baby" and maybe it thinks I'm keyword stuffing. But the reality is just about every picture I display is a "newborn baby picture" or "baby photograph." Is it possible that Google thinks I'm trying to spam it by using these words over and over, even if they are words that accurately describe what's in the image?
-
Make sure...
- file name contains keywords
- wherever you use the image, make sure the alt text and title text is keyword friendly
- the image appears on a page that is relevant to the main keywords
- the text surrounding the image (e.g. caption) gives the image more context as well
Don't worry about exif/meta data.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
Homepage disappeared from Google Serp
I redirected my domain using this code in .htaccess : RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^xxxx.com
Technical SEO | | digitalkiddie
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]/)index.(html?|php)(?[^\ ])?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]/)*)index.(html?|php)$ http://www.xxxx.com/$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> A day after I did it, got an error in GWMT "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" and my homepage disappeared from the result pages. When I try to open Google cache of the homepage I got an error 404. I generated new robots.txt, uploaded it , now the error doesnt show but still my homepage is not in the serps. Its been 3 days. What should I do ? Thanks in advance "Google can't find your site's robots.txt" error? - Pro ...0 -
Is this a google dance?
My website keeps moving up and down in ranking but stays within page 2 to 3. Everyday its at a new position.
Technical SEO | | ragivan0 -
Google Sitelinks
We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week. However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page. I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page. Why are they not linking to the right page? I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?! Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ahamill0 -
Are Google now indexing iFrames?
A client is pulling content through an iFrame, and when searching for a snippet of that exact content the page that is pulling the data is being indexed and not the iFrame page. Seen this before?
Technical SEO | | White.net0