How to tell image search which image matters?

Question

Google image search seems to do a poor job on a site I run in identifying which image on a page should be indexed. In addition it doesn't seem to link that image with lots of the associated data.

Are there any ways of focusing attention for spiders on particular images and associated data, do they need to be within the same tags, or adjacent on the page?

Answer 1

All images on a page should be indexed. If they aren't then improve your alt tags and possibly rename the image file. There really isn't anything more you can do since search-engines do not read any other context for the image itself except size. If google thinks the image is a duplicate it won't index it either.

Of course if images really do inherit context from the surrounding page then you could just use less images or move them into CSS.

Answer 2

A few tips:

• Use a descriptive name, i.e. "tabby-cat.jpg" instead of "img02396.jpg".
• Use alt tags on images.
• Use descriptive text on the page and around the image.
• Make sure the images are in the generated source, i.e. if you click "View source" in your browser, you see <img> tags.
• It's also useful to validate your site at http://validator.w3.org in case there are major errors like missing brackets etc that could prevent a spider from parsing the page. (Note: I wouldn't worry about making everything 100% valid since Google is fine with invalid code)
• Images in CSS (i.e. backgrounds) are not indexed AFAIK. However I'd suggest using CSS backgrounds for "design" images (a subtle way of getting Google to ignore site headers, custom borders, shadows, etc).
• Nor are any images generated from Javascript.
• Make sure you're not blocking images through robots.txt. I know that Joomla does this by default.
• Sign up at Google Webmaster Tools, add your site, then allow it to be used in Google's "Image Labeller" game which should help tag images.

Answer 3

I think Search robot can not read images as we do, so the simple and must thing you should do to your images is using descriptive names, so that spider could know what this image all about. Second one is using ALT tags on images, put in keywords relating to the images. Those thing are what I do.