Google Image Best Practices

August 16, 2020August 17, 2020 Saurabh Bhardwaj 0 Comments

Google Images is a great way to get traffic to your website. You need to optimize images with new features, such as image captions, prominent badges & AMP with more context around images. Below are Google Image best practices to appear in Google Images search results.

User Experience Matters

You need to focus on user experience to improve your visibility in Google Images. Keep in mind, make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

Content: You need to make sure that images are relevant to the topic of the page. It should add original value to the page.
Placement: Always place images near to the relevant text. Also, place an important image at the top of the page.
Avoid text inside images: Don’t include text in images, always put text in HTML, and put keywords in the alt text of an image tag.
Good content: Always create good quality content on your website, quality content is equally important as quality images. Also, Google considers page content quality when ranking images.
Mobile Optimized: Make sure that your page is device friendly and fitting according to the screen size of the device. You can check your website in mobile-friendly testing tools and make the adjustment.
Images URL Structure: Image URL path and file name also important, consider putting a relevant keyword in it. For example, my-black-shoes.jpg is better than IMG21923.JPG.

Title and Description

Google uses page title and description to generate a snippet in Google images’ results. It would be best if you focused on improving the quality of the title and description of your page by following Google’s title and snippet guidelines.

Structure Data

You should add structured data to your images. Google Images can display your images as rich results, including a prominent badge, which gives better-targeted traffic to your site. Currently, Google Images supports structured data for Product, Video, and Recipe.

Website Speed

Images play an essential role in the page size and loading time of your website. You should make sure to practice image optimization techniques. Also, consider turning your page into AMP to reduce load time.

Good Quality Photos

Make sure you are always using High-quality photos. Google and Users don’t like blurry and unclear images. Also, it helps in showing sharp thumbnail to get traffic from users.

Semantic Markup for Images

Google does not index CSS images. Google crawls your HTML pages to index images.

Good: <img src="black-shoes.jpg" alt="puma black shoes" />
Bad: <div style="background-image:url(black-shoes.jpg)">puma black shoes</div>

Image sitemap

An image is an important part of your page, it helps to catch the attention of your users. Image sitemaps can contain URLs from other domains as well, but in regular sitemaps, you can not put cross domains. You can use CDNs (content delivery networks) to host images. Also, you should verify the CDN’s domain name in the Search Console to know any crawl errors you can get.

Supported formats

Google supports BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG images. You can also inline images as Data URIs. Data URIs provide a way to include a file, such as an image, inline by setting the src of an img element as a Base64 encoded string:

<img src="data:image/svg+xml;base64,[data]">

You should always follow Google guidelines to ran better in search results. If you have any query, please let me know in comment section.

Saurabh Digital