SEO and pictures

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 21. January 2008 - 0:00

Q: How to make it easy for Google to retrieve pictures?

A: Google faces a very big problem, the Internet is infinite. There are always new pages created everyday by people like me. The scariest for Google is the number of web pages that are generated by databases. They are the one that have question marks, equal signs and &… Google has a finite capacity of exploring the web. Google has a couple million of computers as of spring 2009! Even with 2 million computers, it's not enough, especially when you need to crawl through a trillion of web pages on regular basis, then analyze these web pages and index them.

Google doesn't need to crawl and index the whole Internet. Google only need to index enough of the Internet so that people will keep on using them and to click on the ads.

Google has placed many restrictions on which website will be crawled or not, which website will be indexed or not. Basically, if you make it easy for Google, they will index your website and your pictures/photos.

Rules of the road for Google and pictures/photos

  1. Only use JPEGs. Do not use GIF, PNG, or Bit maps… Only JPEG. Why? Because that's what Google decided.
  2. The JPEG photo must be big enough. At least 265px × 180px. A small thumbnail will not be indexed by Google.
  3. The JPEG photo should have a title in the metadata.
  4. The JPEG photo should have a caption next to the photo.
  5. The JPEG photo should have keywords associated in the metadata.
  6. The JPEG photo should have a descriptive name, such as dog-0035.jpg for the photo of a dog and not 08976_111a.jpg.
  7. The JPEG photo should have a name with dashes - and not underscores, such as dog-0035.jpg for the photo of a dog and not 2003_11_23_0035.jpg. Google does not parse the _. Google just ignores the underscore and bunches everything together. The name of 2003_11_23_0035.jpg will be transformed into: 200311230035.jpg.
  8. The JPEG photo should have an HTML ALT tag. You can use the metadata keywords.
  9. The JPEG photo should be toward the beginning of the web page.
  10. The web page with the JPEG photo should contains the same keywords as the JPEG metadata keywords.
  11. Don't bother with the thumbnails, Google will generate their own.
  12. The JPEG photo should be high contrast with bright colours. Why? Because somebody at Google decided that they want high contrast, also it's easier to see the thumbnail of a high contrast photo.

Ideally, you should write explanations for the photos with the same keywords as the one in the JPEG.