Images on your site are very important, it has said a lot about already. Internet users often pay attention to the illustrated sites and ignore the ones where there is only the text. This article focuses on how to correctly place the images on your site that they are guaranteed to be indexed by Google or Yandex.
If you want your images to appear in the pictures search, you need to observe the following rules:
If you want to index the gallery, then each individual image should have its own html-page with the appropriate title, meta description and other attributes as in the usual pages.
If a gallery works in the way the images are displayed in a beautiful pop-up window, you must provide alternate links for those who do not have JavaScript enabled. Among them are search engines, so they should be possible to switch to HTML-version of the page with the image. In addition, if there is no individual pages, search engines will not be able to take the description of the image, and, therefore, to show images in search results.
Make sure that the page with a picture (URL of the page and the image path itself) is not forbidden in robots.txt.
Some CMS have a standard robots.txt file, in which utilities folders are forbidden for indexing, including images folder. Even if you do not use any CMS, you still need to check to see if the image is not in the forbidden for indexing folder.
Disable indexing of auxiliary images: menu items, navigation buttons, and other graphic elements. Thumbnails of images also should be forbidden for indexing.
In order not to clutter up the search results by the meaningless images, you need to plan the structure of sections of your site. All kinds of utility images should be put into individual sections and prevented for indexing. If you do not, there will be many fragmented and useless images in the search results.
Name the image file appropriately.
Do not leave the default file name that is set by photo-camera. You need to rename the files in accordance with what they represented.
Specify the alt and title attributes for images.
Alt and title must be given a meaningful, short, human-understandable terms, without an overabundance of keywords. You can not leave an empty string (alt = “”).
Make sure that the quotes are escaped when you specify the alt and title.
If you use the automatic generation of pages with images, the names may contain some of the quotes, which demolish the page layout and will not allow the image be properly indexed. You need to escape quotes, or in extreme cases, cut them out completely.
If there is a link to an image, form it correctly.
Some pages may refer to the image, so the link must be coherent, understandable, and adequately describe what is shown in the picture. If the images are used instead of text links as it often happens in the navigation buttons of galleries, Google will take alt of the image as a caption to a picture in search results. Therefore, you must not specify an alt as the “Previous Image” and so on. The links must have a title, indicating the image the user to move when she clicks.
Specify the height and width of the image.
If you do not specify them, then users with turned off graphics will see a rectangle of small size. With specified dimensions, such a user will see the rectangle of corresponding dimensions, that will keep the page layout and logic. It should be remembered that there are various mobile browsers that can display images in a specific way.
Put an image as close as possible to the area of text to which it applies.
The image itself is better to be placed as high as possible, preferably in the first paragraph of the text. The text near the image should refer to what is shown. If a paragraph written about a squirrel and a duck will be drawn, that will be the way it indexed, which will lead to the loss of traffic.
Sign the image directly in the same block as the image itself.
You can not separate and place in different blocks the picture and accompanying caption to it. If in the paragraph (tag p) appears an image, the search robot expects to see a signature to the image immediately after the image in the same paragraph.
Ensure that the pages with images available for display in the frame of Google-images.
When displaying images in the search results, Google will display the page of this image in a frame in the background. If a page is not allowed to be shown in a frame, Google will simply fill the background by beige color, that’s ugly.
Do not place foreign, alien elements in the image.
If we are not talking about the scheme, the text in the image will be very annoying. This also applies to large and too prominent watermark. Customers are less likely to click on the picture in which they can see some foreign text.
Place pictures in high quality.
Users are more likely to click on the image with adequate resolution and quality, rather than on the small and poor quality.
Include information about the images in the sitemap (if it is generated), or use other means of automatic delivery of information about the images to search engines.