Prepare your site images for indexing Google images.

Question

I’m trying to understand how I can make my site accessible from Google’s crawlers. I like the last.fm solution, and I thought of using a technique like his staff to google to find artist images on my pages.

When I search for an artist and I search for him in a Google image search , as often as I do not find the image from last.fm artists page, I make an example:

If I am looking for a group of Pure Reason Revolution This brings me here, artist image page
http://www.last.fm/music/Pure+Reason+Revolution/+images/4284073

Now, if I look at the image file, I see that it is called:
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/4284073/Pure+Reason+Revolution+4.jpg
therefore, if I try to understand how the service works, I can try to say:
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/ image serving server
500/ selected size for image
4284073/ Image ID for the database
Pure+Reason+Revolution+4.jpg image name

It was hard for me to think that the real file name for the image is Pure+Reason+Revolution+4.jpg to overwrite the image when the user loads it, in facts, if I figure:
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/4284073.jpg
I probably find the actual image location and file name

I see that this can be done using the mod_rewrite engine, but with this tecnique, will the image be very accessible to search engines and easily archived?

My question is: is there any manual or tutorial for approaching this kind of methods, or something similar?

Answer 1

In my opinion, the best resource for your question is Google .

One of the guides is aimed at searching for Google images and contains some recommendations:

• Do not insert text inside images
• Tell us as much as possible about the image.
  • Give your images detailed, informative file names.
  • Create great alt text
  • Anchor text
• Provide a good context for your image.
• Think of the best ways to protect your images.
• Create a great user interface.

Source: Images - Help for webmasters .

Regarding last.fm, one of the suggestions:

Give your images detailed, informative file names.

The file name may give Google clues about the subject of the image. Try to make your file name a good description of the subject image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is much more informative than IMG00023.JPG. Descriptive file names can also be useful for users: if we cannot find the appropriate text on the page we found, we will use the file name as a fragment of the image in our search results.

So yes, last.fm uses mod_rewrite to give an informative file name that Google likes.

There are a few more guides. None of them are formal, but they can help you anyway:

http://www.tareeinternet.com/forum/seo/236-optimizing-google-image-search.html

http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-optimize-for-google-images-for-more-traffic/

http://creativebits.org/webdev/optimize_your_site_for_google_image_search

http://www.pearsonified.com/2007/01/get_53_percent_more_searches_with_one_tweak.php

Answer 2

The article noted by Tim contains most of them, but I would like to add that the title attribute on the <img> tags is also important (but don't abuse it!).

Summarizing:

• Name your files well. apple.jpg is better than SEO wiser than PIC2346.jpg. For spaces in file names, use dashes (-) rather than underscores (_). See Gums versus underscore for details.
• Alyays fill alt attibute. Keep in mind that most blind screen readers read this tag.
• Fill in the title attribute when using. Use a short statement describing the image. Not a complete paragraph!
• The context of the image (which is the content around it) is also very important. If the image matches the surrounding content, it will give you more SEO “points”.