Image Optimization - For Better Search Engine Visibility

One of the most underused area in search engine optimization is Image Optimization. Search engines are giving importance to images and site owners are seeing their image shown in regular search results, only few are using image search optimization.

In this post I will try to cover all the points which will help webmasters and site owners to optimize their images for better search engine ranking.

1. The very first thing take original photos, so that you can brand them with your trademark, logo or url. At business listing sites, add your business logo to creates a more significant effect on users’ mind.

2. Find out some sites where your images can appear as search result, can get indexed and crawled by search engines. All major search engines show images in search result either in vertical image search or within contextual search results.

3. Use photo sharing sites to upload your photos for better visibility (Flickr.

4. Maintain quality of images and photos. Resolution of images is very important so try to adjust it between full size images and thumbnails.

5. Try to save images in standard format. The most popular format are JPEG and GIF format.

6. Name your photo according to the theme of the photo. The name should be related to the photo and should describe its theme such as “latest_mobile_phones.jpeg” and not as “xyz.jpeg”

7. Alt tag and title tag should be appropriate and should describe the photo.

8. The size and weight of the image should be propositional. Heavy images take more time to download and consumes more bandwidth.

9. Try to specify size of the image i.e. width and height when defining image on webpage. If you don’t mention the image size then html parser itself need to consider the image size and it’ll take some extra time to process.

10. Images with lot of content around them ranks better in search engines. As content around an image describes the purpose and theme of the image.

11. You can create trust of your website among visitors by adding images of testimonials from customers, celebrities’ snaps or award winning snapshots.

12. Publicize your website’s logo by adding them on press releases and other such content.

13. Adding logo to your profile while submitting your website to directories.

14. If you are sending newsletter through Email marketing adding Logo helps in creating brand.

15. Use thumbnails and original large image as needed. Use proper image size where needed. Using inappropriate image size will affect usability of website.

16. Google webmaster tool provides an option “enable enhanced image search”. Enable it. It will help imagebot to crawl your images.

17. Bookmark your photos and images using social networking sites such as Facebook, Digg etc.

18. Never exclude images folder from search engine robots. Blocking images folder in robots.txt file will exclude them from getting indexed.

19. Don’t use java script to access any image link. It will never get crawled by search engine.

20. Google’s tool such as Google Image Labeler is used to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images. Google Image Labeler.

List of Image Search Engines

1. Imagery 2. Google Image Search 3. Yahoo Image Search 4. Ask Images Search 5. MSN Live Image Search

6. Corbis 7. PicSearch 8. Exalead 9. Pixsy 10. Visoo

11. Netvue 12. Flickr Images 13. Webshots 14. Photobucket 15. Getty Images Search 16. AltaVista Image Search

List of photo sharing sites:

1. 23 2. Animus3 3. Art Limited 4. DeviantART 5. DropShots 6. Flickr 7. FocalPower 8. Fotki 9. Fotolog 10. Gallery 2 11. Humble Voice 12. ImageEvent 13. Ipernity 14. Kodak Gallery 15. Koffee Photo

16. Multiply 17. My Photo Album 18. One True Media 19. Panoramio 20. PBase 21. Phanfare 22. Photo.net 23. Photobucket 24. PhotoSIG 25. Photoworks 26. Photrade 27. Picasa 28. Picateers 29. Pickle 30. PicMe

31. Pix.ie 33. RedBubble 34. rmbr 35. Shutterfly 36. Slide 37. SmugMug 38. Snapfish.com by HP 39. Tabblo 40. Walgreens 41. Webshots 42. Winkflash 43. Zenfolio 44. Zooomr 45. Zoto

Some Facts About Flash Optimization

Historically websites based on flash were unable to get crawled by search engines. Content such as text and links embedded in the Flash (SWF) files was of no use for search engines. This situation created frustration among web developers who tried every method to get their site get indexed by major search engines and get ranking in SERP. This situation created problem for searchers, as they were missing some quality content for there queries.

Google in cooperation with Adobe developed a new algorithm for Flash, according to which Googlebot can now indexes “textual content in Flash (SWF)” and can also extracts URLs embeded in Flash files.

Google is being working on for years to crawl rich media files such as flash and java script. Now when google has developed such technology, few questions need to be answered.

1. Does Google associate text content in Flash with the correct parent URL?
2. Can Flash files have PageRank?
3. Can Google Translate Flash content


1. Does Google associate text content in Flash with the correct parent URL?

According to google, flash (SWF) files that are embedded in the HTML of webpage its text is associated with the parent URL ie. they are indexed as single unit. But studies show that this is not completely true. Flash file URL and parent URL are indexed separately.

2. Can Flash files have PageRank?

Flash files can get page rank but currently it is having some issues. According to studies links that are present in flash files can pass page rank and so they can get page rank also. The issue is that flash file i.e. SWF files and parent URL both get page rank but in some cases they may differ.

3. Can Google Translate Flash content?

Google cannot translate flash content. To verify this try to translate any flash (SWF) file using google translator. You will get No results found.

Google’s Case Sensitive Issues

When google crawls webpages over the internet to find fresh and unique content, it also crawls pages with duplicate content. Below are some of the factors which are generally not discussed as a result duplicate URL’s and content is crawled by google.

Google crawling is case insensitive

Starting with URI specification

Scheme and hostname are case insensitive i.e. the below url’s are treated same.

http://www.xyx.com/ = HTTP://www.Xyz.com/

But in case of Directories and filenames it is case sensitive

The below examples are treated as 3 different URLs

* http://www.xyz.com/Page1.html
* http://www. xyz.com/PAGE1.HTML
* http://www.xyz.com/page1.html

Google and Case Issues

Crawling

Google considers case variations in directory and filename and will consider the below URL’s as different and may crawl all the 3

* http://www.xyz.com/Page1.html
* http://www.xyz.com/PAGE1.HTML
* http://www.xyz.com/page1.html

Indexing

When case-varied URLs are accessible and webserver does not redirect to the preferred URL
Duplicate content is crawled between different URL cases.
It consolidate properties (such as link information) between duplicate URL’s and stores them.
It will display, high-ranking URL selected from case-sensitive URL comparisons.

URL Case Recommendations

Web server default behavior is as follows

* IIS is case insensitive it will treat Page1.html = page1.html, the two pages are treated as same
* Apache is case-sensitive it will treat Page1.html != page1.html, the two pages are treated as different

The most important issue which is not much discussed is robots.txt is case sensitive for paths

The below example will explain the same

* Disallow: /abc = disallow: /abc
* Disallow: /ABC != Disallow: /abc, the two paths are treated as different

Recommendation

1. Follow consistent design format for URL’s either choose ePuppy.html or epuppy.html

2. It is recommended and is often more error-proof to create all lowercase URLs such as epuppy.html

3. Verify case sensitive paths with Webmaster Tools’ robots.txt analysis tool

If the above mentioned points are considered while creating a website many duplicate issues can be solved.