Google has significantly improved their Image Publishing Guidelines, offering more comprehensive and actionable information. These updates could enhance image ranking, make them more likely to appear in rich results, ensure they are voice assistant friendly, and potentially drive more traffic to your website.
Image Search SEO Tips
Google has shared valuable image search SEO tips. Key takeaways include:
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Provide Good Context: Ensure images are contextually relevant, as surrounding text influences Google’s interpretation of the image content.
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Optimize Image Placement: Position images near relevant text to help Google understand their context. Adding captions or placing key images near the top of the page are recommended strategies.
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Create Informative and High-Quality Sites: The overall quality of content is a factor in image ranking and helps generate meaningful snippets. Ensure page content relates to the images.
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Create Device-Friendly Sites: With more users searching via mobile, ensuring mobile-friendliness is crucial for ranking and traffic optimization.
- Create Good URL Structure for Your Images: Google uses file paths and names to understand and rank images better. Organize images in meaningful folders, such as /mens/ and /womens/ for different clothing types, rather than a generic folder.
Technical SEO Tips for Image Search
The updated guidelines also offer technical advice for better-ranking pages and images:
Check Your Page Title & Description
Google confirms the role of the title element and meta description in their image search algorithm. While not direct ranking factors, they help generate snippets that can influence click-through rates.
Add Structured Data
Structured data is crucial for rich results and voice-assisted searches. Google’s Voice Assistant is integrated into over 5,000 devices. By including structured data, images can be displayed as rich results with prominent badges, providing users with relevant information and potentially increasing targeted traffic.
Additional Insights on Structured Data
- For recipes, include Recipe markup.
- For products, use Product markup.
- For videos, add Video markup.
More SEO Advice for Image Search
Google concludes with the following SEO tips for image search:
- Optimize image size for speed.
- Enhance photo sharpness.
- Use descriptive titles, captions, alt text, file names, and surrounding text.
- Utilize an XML Image Site Map.
- Implement Safe Search SEO by segregating adult content into a separate image folder.
The updated Image Publishing Guidelines offer more actionable SEO tips compared to previous versions. While it’s unclear if Danny Sullivan contributed to these guidelines, they are exceptionally useful and worthy of note.
Images by Shutterstock, modified by the author.
