One element often overlooked in web marketing campaigns is the value of images to brand development and brand marketing. The screenshot is from a Google Images search for ‘RI Product Photography’ and is dominated my photography brand ‘George Ross Photography'(highlighted in red). Clearly, I am very pleased about this but how can you create results like this for your business?
- Include the keyword in the filename e.g. keyword.jpg
- Include the keyword in the image Alt tag e.g. alt=” keyword”
- Add a physical watermark to your images to present your brand visually and make an ownership statement
- Add copyright information to the image IPTC information (Not for SEO proposes but for copyright protection)
- Create an images.xml sitemap
- Upload the sitemap to Google Webmasters and Bing Webmasters accounts
In an ideal world, it would be optimal if you could wrap copy around your images which discuss the keyword used in the image.
If you have some images that you do not want The Google Image Crawler from locating and publicizing then update your Robots.txt using the following:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
In this example the image dogs.jpg will be blocked from the Googlebot image crawler.
Like all aspects of SEO, attention to detail is of paramount importance.