SEO Your Images: Enhanced Image Search

We already know that ALT tags should be used for relevant images (I say relevant because you can skip putting ALT tags for images placed in your page for purely aesthetic and/or organisational purposes such as borders). However, what many neglect to do is to take advantage of Google’s enhanced image search. The enhanced image search is actually very useful for helping the images in your pages rank better in Google images SERPs. Enhanced image search actually helps you rank better through the selection of labels that are more relevant to the images in your site. According to Google they are able to associate the image sin your site with relevant labels through the use of Google Image Labeler.

To opt-in to Google’s enhanced image search simply login to Google Webmaster Tools, choose the URL of the site you wish to have the enhanced image search enables, click Tools, and then click on Enable enhanced image search.

If you have a graphics intensive site you should really opt-in to this feature. If you worry that your images will rank better than your site and that users will end up simply ripping off your images (many actually do not visit the actual site but only go to the image URL) you can remedy this problem by redirecting users sent by Google. You can also disallow hotlinking of images.

Rehashing Relevance

One of the key things in search engine optimisation is relevance. Before I discuss relevance though let me give you the dictionary definition of the word it was derived from, relevant.

relevant (adj): closely connected or appropriate to the matter at hand

Hence when talking about relevance in SEO terms what is taken into consideration is the just how relevant or closely connected the search terms entered by search engines users are to the actual contents of a web page and/or an entire website. Because of this fact SEO is definitely more than just making sure that your page has the lots of keywords and phrases but also making sure that the search engines can clearly see they are indeed highly relevant to the rest of the contents of the page.

Here are some tips to help emphasise the relevance of keywords within a page with respect to each other and the entire page’s content:

• Unless it is the homepage, make sure that each page has a theme or specific topic.
  
• Use a broad spectrum of keywords from the generic to the more specific and from the highly competitive to the more obscure ones.
  
• Jumble the words used within phrases to accommodate for different search patterns of users.
  
• The most important keywords should be used in the page title and the headings.
  
• Organise your paragraphs/sections so as to place relevant words nearer each other. The proximity of related terms will further increase the apparent relevance of the search term to the page’s contents.
  
• Remember that search engines are smart and getting smarter each day. Don’t try to fool them by placing hidden unrelated text (we all know what this is called!) in hopes of conning people to get to your irrelevant (to the search term) page. It will likely work but you can get caught!
  
• Don’t forget to put a keyword(s) on the anchor text of links and make sure that you only link to pages that have the same/similar topic.
  
• Don’t sweat over words with the same spelling but different meaning search engines can now (for the most part) determine what you really want to convey…especially if you did your job and followed the tips above.