SEO Blog - UK Search Engine Marketing

Last week Hitwise reported that Google Image Search accounts for 6.82% of Google properties.

Here’s the top 20 Google domains from January 2008:

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Google Images is a great source of traffic, it can even be a great source of links, but recently the algorithm seems to be getting more complicated.

Lets take a look at the image search results for the iPhone for example. Normally I would suggest the following steps to get your image ranking on this page:

• Call the image iphone.jpg
• Use “iPhone” as the alt text
• Make sure your image is placed on a page with an iPhone story on
• Embed the image within the first paragraph of text
• Use the keyword “iPhone” next to the image

A few months ago this was all you needed to do to get good rankings in Google Images but the goalposts seem to have moved.

Looking at the images ranking for “iphone” not one of them has all the attributes above. In fact, not one image has both the alt text “iPhone” and the filename iphone.jpg. Some don’t even have the keyword in the alt text. A few images use underscores rather than hyphens which I previously recommended.

The best way to get good rankings seems to be to write a more detailed and descriptive alt text and to use a longer file name.

Have you noticed this? What factors have you found to be in the new image search algorithm?

Seeing that the UK don’t seem to be getting any sunlight this summer I did a few searches for some places which do. While searching for Barcelona on Google Images I noticed a picture of Theirry Henry listed, nothing too strange there expect that the photo was from Monday when he signed for FC Barcelona!

I couldn’t find any further information about an increase in Google Images indexing and as far as I’m aware the last update back was in March. It’s possible there has been a full update within the last 24 hours but if that’s the case I still wouldn’t expect this image to be included, what seems likely is that a limited number of highly regarded news sources are getting images indexed far more frequently. The Shanghai Daily isn’t the only website where this is happening, images from uefa.com and tsn.ca covering the same story are also indexed.