Web Site Promotion

Millions of people search for images every day. And if yours is near the top that is a marketing opportunity. Some people report they get nearly as many visits through image searching as regular searching.

Google Images

Google uses a different bot to crawl for images. Its sole purpose in life is to index images. One key thing to realize is the bot visits are much less frequent that the Google indexing bot. It may be up to 6 months between visits.

To see what images have been found so far:

1. Go to images.google.com
2. type in: site:mydomain.com (replace mydomain.com with your domain)

The images specific to your website will show up along with an image description. It is important to get a good, pertinent description for each image. According to Google they use the alt tag, surrounding text, overall web page theme, and filename to aid in determining on how to label the image.

Go to images.google.com and type in the description that is under one of the images. It will probably show up on the first result page. As you can see, the URL of your website is below it albeit unclickable…but the image is clickable and will take you to where the image exists - your website.

Image Search Positioning Tips

Here are some tips on improving your image search positioning:

• Give meaningful filenames to your images (describe in 3 words or less)
• Fill in the alt tag for each image with a meaningful description
• Big images have more impact than small ones
• Add a descriptive caption beneath the image
• Use alt=”" for unimportant images

Conclusion

A little bit of focused work on images can pay off with big dividends. Your work on images will carry over to other image search engines such as Yahoo and MSN.

Doug