Google Image Search Questions Answered

Way back I wrote an article about a small experiment that I did on Google’s image search. Recently Evan from Google has answered a few questions of a webmaster in regards to image search. Typical to Google he has not mentioned exactly what are the things that you need to do to optimize for Google image search but his answer definitely gives some good hint at certain things that are important for Google Image search. Here are the pointers that I picked from it…

a) First you need to ensure that images from your site are indexed by Google and are not filtered out for Safe Search. you can use the site:domain.com command on http//images.google.com to check the index status and check the safe search status by toggling the link given below the image search box.

b) Alt Attributes and image title tags matter but they are not the only thing that factors in image search rankings.

c) useful file naming definitely helps.

d) The context and the information surrounding the image also contributes to the ranking of the image.

e)Google image search also considers the ranking of the parent or the linking page . If the parent or the ranking page does not have enough information or does not rank well, Google might be in doubt whether to show an image from that page or site.