How to Optimize Image for Various Search Engines ?

Image search is almost offered by each type of search engines. It is Image search which gets huge number of end users after organic search. According to Comscore, more than 1 billion image searches were performed in the month of October 2008 itself.  Well, looking to the huge number of end users it is always wise to include Image searches in the strategy too by optimizing the image for the Search Engines.  Now comes how does search engines crawl those images and what are the criteria to optimize the same. Here I want to make sure that all those images being a binary file, search engines are unable to crawl them completely. As they have to rely on text surrounding the image, the alt attributes, Caption and so on to crawl it completely.  Here I want to again make sure that all those crawlers give due importance to text surrounding the image, the alt attribute within the img tag and the image filename.

Search Engines not only depends upon the alt attribute and file name but they even consider the relevancy of content in the page, Title tag, H1 Tags and even links to the page are some of the factors which boost the confidence of web crawler. 

Let see an example for the same – If you have an image on a page and it is a picture of one of the wonder The Taj Mahal and the title, heading tag, and page content all support that, the search engines confidence in the content of the image increases.

Let consider some of the points which will help you to optimize you website for image search:

• The Image file name or img src string should contain your primary keywords.
• Always use the image alt attribute. It helps the Search crawler to better understand the img.
• Avoid using too much query string for Img scrs as you do for page urls.
• Do not save image as a graphics file with embedded thumbails
• If you are using images that displayed on other websites, make sure to display them at different sizes from how you have found them.
• Add Relevant Caption at the end of Each Image.