Getting to the top of Google can be a daunting experience for any web site. Google, along with other major search engines offer “image search”. I am a firm believer that a photograph or image is worth a thousand words, now even more so with Google''''s Universal Search. You can find the “image search” link on the top of Google’s main page, or any search results page. Even better, Google has been including images within the normal search results, testing their new universal search approach.
The universal search may include images, videos, blogs, and other types of media. A year ago, when searching for “tree”, you would see nothing but web page results show up in the search engine results page (SERP). Now, with the new universal search approach, Google now includes results for images. The image results, contained within the text SERPs, are usually well-placed towards the top of the SERPs.
What’s all this mean? Optimize your images on your main pages, landing pages, and just about every type of page within your web site or blog. Images can be modified various ways to help them show up within the SERPs, both image SERPs and normal web SERPs. By optimizing images correctly, you’ll be able to gain more traffic by having people click on your photo or image since it’s now in front of their face on the top of Google’s search results. Everyone likes a good picture to look at instead of just text, text, text…
Top of Google with Images and Supporting Text
A few things that help when optimizing your images to and get top Google rankings with images is within the code. Use the “alt” tag to your advantage, naming it similar to the image file name, which in turn should be named to describe the image. Many people leave out the “alt” tag in their code and name images something like “img2004.jpg”, even though the image is of a tree (using tree as an example). A better approach would be similar to: <img src=”tall-pine-tree.jpg” alt=”Tall Pine Tree”>
Supporting text is important with image search. You’ll want to add keyword rich content on both sides of the image, similar to building link pages with quite a few links. Instead of just having an image on the page with proper tags, go ahead and insert supporting text before and after the image you’re optimizing. This will also help Google classify your image per your needs and it’s just another way to get to the top of Google!
