Google Image Search and Alt Tags
For further reach on your traffic and visitors, are you considering the images used in your blog posts? A lot of people think that they are but they’re missing the full potential available. So, with this post, let’s talk about alt tags and Google’s Image Search.
It’s typical for a lot of bloggers to place images in every single post. I do it. Sometimes I even do more than one. Images are good to use in that they give your visitors something visual to what the post is about. Using the idea that a lot of your visitors aren’t actually readers, images slow down the visitor and catch their eye to draw them in.
For most bloggers, images are vital to their overall game plan when it comes to traffic and visitors. But, are you missing the mark or not making the most of it?
Before I go further, let me say here that you’ll need to have a Google Webmaster account to follow along with me. And if you don’t have an account with Google, now is the time to get one. Not only do they provide powerful webmaster tools but analytics tools as well. A must use for serious webmasters!
Opt-In to Image Search
Our very first step is to ensure that you have opted into Google’s Enhanced Image Search. This is a matter of a single checked box.
- Login into your webmaster tools account
- Select the domain name that you’d like to opt in with
- Click on tools from the left-hand side menu
- Select “enable enhanced image searchâ€
- Check box to opt in to enhanced image search
By opting into the enhanced image searching you’re allowing Google to index the images used on your site. This means that you’ll have visitors that hit your site straight from the Google image search resulting in more organic searches to your site.
But opting into the enhanced image search is just not enough. You have to make sure that you’re properly tagging the images that you use on your site so that they can be found. And this is where alt tags come in!
Inserting the Alt Tag
An alt tag uses key descriptive words to describe the picture that you have inserted. I want to show you how to place the alt tag inside of your image code string.
Unlike formatting a link for the no follow tag, we’ll be formatting an image for both an alt and title tag. Both are vital to every single image you use on your website (in or out of a post).
Let’s focus on post images.
I’d first like to recommend that you use FTP to upload your images to your hosting account. Uploading images in the dashboard is great and will get the job done. However, to properly insert the alt tag with your image code, you need to actually use code view. WordPress, no matter what others have told you, does not insert an alt tag into your image code string.
It’s commonly believed that when an image is uploaded in the WordPress dashboard, by filling out the “description” something will happen with your alt tags. This is not true.
Anything placed in the “description” box when uploading in the dashboard will not appear in the code output for the image in your blog post:
As you can see in the image above, filling out the line that reads “Title” will place a title tag in your code output for the image that you’re uploading. However, let me say it again, nothing will be used from the “description” box so do not fill this out thinking that you’re providing the best optimization for search engines on your images. You’re not and this is where I believe some bloggers are missing the mark.
Choosing to hand code your images in or not, you still need to use the code view of the what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor when writing a post.
This is easier than you think!
I’m going to insert the banner for I’m Blogging That
To do this I first need to code the image’s location within my hosting account:
<img src="http://www.imbloggingthat.com/images/125-ibt-png.png" />
That string of code alone will insert my image into my post. But I haven’t done anything to optimize this for search engines (or screen readers). On to the next step, add your title tag:
<img src="http://www.imbloggingthat.com/images/125-ibt-png.png" title="I'm Blogging That" />
OK, getting warmer but for Google Image Search, we need to have that alt tag so that Google has something for their bots to know what the image is! Now, here comes the alt tag:
<img src="http://www.imbloggingthat.com/images/125-ibt-png.png" title="I'm Blogging That" alt="I'm Blogging That" />
Easy enough?
By inserting the alt tag into your image’s code output you’re telling Google’s bots what your image is. A bot can’t see the image but by giving the alt tag attribute to your image’s code, you’re telling them what it is. This is a good chance to use keyword rich information. Don’t go overboard, you don’t want to be penalized but do make sure that you’re being descriptive to what the image is so that once indexed, you’re actually found by your image.
That’s it… you’ve optimized for images. Keep at it, make sure you’re using BOTH alt and title tags, every single time.
For more on alt tags, check out Matt Cutt’s video on YouTube talking about the importance of alt tags.
March 20th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Google indexing of images also seems to open you up for people stealing your images, or at least using your image URLs and stealing bandwidth.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Sarah » While that may be true, many hosting accounts provide some sort of hot link protection that you can utilize and monitor with ease. Using that feature will allow you to still opt in to Google images.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:20 am
Hi
Great tip with the Google thing, didn’t know that. I am generally quite good at naming my images with obvious ‘names’ and doing the ALT and TITLE tags. Basically because a lot of the images I use are my own photographs, so do want people to find them. Was not aware of the Google option, so that’s great.
I just have a question though with the ALT and TITLE, bit confused.
I have been placing my images using the ‘code’ aspect of the editor and using the ‘img’ option to place my images. Adding text into the ‘description’ box here that pops up after you have entered the URL does actually add a ‘alt’ tag of the info you enter to the final code. Just doesn’t add a TITLE. WHich I know you have to add manually.
Adding a image through the ‘add/upload image’ option I do get the ALT and TITLE tag added to the final code.
The only thing is that the ALT tag seems to only take the value from the TITLE and actually ignores any specific text you enter into the description field. Seems that there is a difference here, could it be different versions of WP?
I have just checked this again to confirm what I have just said, so it seems you need to then go into and manually alter the ALT tag to something different from the TITLE.
Or have I totally misunderstood what you were saying? :)
Maybe WP3 will sort all this out and allow you to enter the ALT and TITLE at the time of reimporting an image, although as you say, it’s no great hardship.
PS: Thanks for the EntreCard thing. Most thankful. :)
Evolving Ideas to Print & Digital Media
March 21st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
[...] How to Use and Optimize for Google Image Search Having an alt and title tag within your pictures is an SEO must. In fact, if you don’t have the alt’s it will fail a validation. Katy writes a great post as always with photos showing you how to include these. If you are not doing this, I highly recommend reading this post. [...]
March 21st, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Thanks for the post! I’ve always just placed null in my alt tags. Is Webmaster’s Tools a Google product? I think I want to start submitting my images too.
March 22nd, 2008 at 6:52 am
Great post. Would love to see something about the hotlink protection portion of the images.
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:04 am
That is great info and I was just struggling with inserting images on my new design :)
Also, I think the alt tag is needed to be compliant for blind users because they can’t see the images, but their browser can read the alt tag and know it is an image?? Anyhoo, I get what your saying and agree it is important and you described it very well!
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:32 am
Thanks for the information. I had started to use google analytics but had not used my webmaster tools. In following your directions, I also discovered that for some reason google isn’t seeing my sitemap. I have some work to do!
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:46 am
Any words of wisdom on Duplicate Title Tags?
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:23 am
@ Beeker
A Sitemap is not important. If you have a good link structure you don’t need to submit a sitemap. Because if you do, your website pages are will be add to the supplemental index. It is important to know if your website structure is good enough to find deep pages, such as http://website.com/alo/il/hacp.html
If your site is not able to find deep pages, you have to change your website structure. By using a sitemap you can not know whether your website is able to find these pages or not.
There are many reasons which convince you to don’t use sitemaps. Some of them I mentioned above.
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:38 am
Graham » The option that you’re using to insert your images sounds me like the option I didn’t address which is hot linking an image from your WYSIWYG editor. Using that option an alt tag will appear in the code output for your image and like you mentioned, doesn’t provide the option for the title tag.
It’s always been my experience that when an image is uploaded through the dashboard, the alt tag does not appear in the code output. It could very well be a difference in WP versions for that. However, I still believe that regardless, it’s best practice to actually code yourself to insert images. Doing so encourages you as the blogger to become more aware of what you do and how every action with blogging can excel and boost your blogging efforts, traffic, and blog ranking.
You’re quite welcome for the Entrecard credits.
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:47 am
Dani » Webmaster Tools is a Google product, and very much worth using.
Manda » Thank you. I’ll put hot link information on my “to write” list. LOL
Michelle » You’re correct that the alt tag is needed for screen readers. I touch on that in this post, if only for a very brief second as this was more about traffic than what is needed. Alt tags are also needed, in some cases, for XHTML validation.
Beeker » I have always found it quite interesting to watch what Google reports for my blog. Their tools are very useful for a lot of different things throughout a website and certainly tools that every webmaster should be using. And regardless of Rik’s advice to you, I’m still very keen on sitemaps. I believe that anything we can do to help Google with out site is a plus. Additionally, for traditional websites, I find sitemaps very helpful for the end user.
As far as duplicate title tags, care to elaborate on what you mean and where you have duplicate tags?
Rik » Again, I’d like to say that I don’t necessarily agree with you. While structure is important and very much key to good indexing, a blog somewhat allows for good structure of links. However, if Google still wants to use a sitemap and it takes nothing for us bloggers to generate them, by all means it’s something that we should do. While a blog can get too large to actually help the end user with a sitemap, I find them quite useful on standard HTML websites.
March 23rd, 2008 at 7:10 am
With my own experience with some websites is that when I generate an sitemap and I list the sitemap on my website Google doesn’t index all of the pages quickly. But when I submit a sitemap in the Google Webmaster Tools then almost every page I submitted in the Google Webmaster Tools is listed in Google the next day. Of course there are exceptions, for instance when your website is old or has a high pagerank it wouldn’t hurt to submit a sitemap, but when you have a new website I think it is the best to keep it natural. Because with my own experience I can see every new website where I submitted an sitemap for didn’t show up in the first 1000 results, because I think it is or google sandboxed or it wasn’t natural because the pages didn’t get some linklove which is important.
March 23rd, 2008 at 11:26 am
Rik » You’re not the first that I have heard say the same thing about having a sitemap. Personally, I have never setup a sitemap from the very beginning so I don’t have any experience with that. I do however have one that I don’t like to on the site but have submitted to Google (and others). It’s been useful in bringing in more organic search engine traffic.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I was looking thought Google Webmaster Tools and came across the content analysis section. According to this section I have 8 Duplicate Title tags. I have no idea what this means and upon doing a search I am still trying to figure this out.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Beeker » Looking in Google’s Webmaster Tools it looks to me like the title tags they’re talking about are the title=”Title Here” tags placed within link structures. I could be wrong but what I finding seems to pertain to that. Not something I’d be worried about as far as duplicate content.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:55 am
[...] you use lots of images on your blog posts? With Google Images and the Alt tags, you can use it’s full potential and increase your blog traffic and visitors by using [...]
March 26th, 2008 at 1:27 am
Good points.
In my experience you don’t need the title tag (though I guess it doesn’t hurt).
Have an alt tag – and descriptive anchor text near the image and you are 90% there.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
Jordan » A title tag may not be required but certainly falls under “best practice.” The title tag can tell the user more information about where an image came from (in this case) or where a link will take them. It’s also used for additional information by spiders (when not duplicated form the alt tag).
It’s a rare case these days that I create a link or insert an image without the title tag. I suppose everyone has a different practice but this one I’ll keep as something that should be done. It is however interesting to hear a different perspective on the idea. Everyone has something different in the ways they’ll approach the same thing. Thank you for sharing yours.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:06 am
You are right. You should use both where possible. But if I had to chose between one or the other I would always chose ‘Alt’ (Alt text shows up in Internet Explorer when you hover your mouse pointer over an image, Title text shows up in Firefox when you hover over the image).
I guess there is no downside to using both, especially if you can make slightly different to the other to provide slightly different keywords.
Though I think the way you are meant to do it is, say you had a graphic of a sales chart. The title tag would be “Sales Chart” and the alt tag would be “Bar chart showing 20% more sales in May compared to June”.. etc..
March 27th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Having said that, IF I also had the anchor text of an image directly above it, for example, “Photo Of Belfast”, then I think it would be overkill to put “Photo Of Belfast” as the alt tag and “Photo Of Belfast” as the title tag… as well…
(I think).
But if your images are not clickable e.g. they dont link to a larger image or another page, then I guess I generally would use no anchor text, but would use both alt and title tags (hope this makes sense).
March 30th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Any post that doesn’t have an image is very boring, and the text above the image can bring more visitors that the alt tags.
March 30th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Jordan » You pointed out something that I didn’t in this post, even though I knew it. IE does display the alt text as a title tag. This is something that Firefox doesn’t do (mostly because it’s more code compliant where IE is not). I use IE so little that this is a tid bit I have forgotten about. And I would agree with you that if I was choosing one option over another, I would also pick the alt tag.
I think you’re right as well talking about the overkill of keywords. There is such thing as keyword spamming, something a lot of SEO’s don’t tell you. But I certainly believe that you can mix it up using both alt and title tags with different information.
F. Blogger » I agree with you! I’m much more interested in having someone attempt to capture my attention in their post with an image. And while displaying an image in a post may help bring in more visitors than an alt tag, it won’t when you’re talking about organic searches from Google Images.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:43 am
[...] area also contains a corresponding image that represents the excerpt that’s shown for a particular area. From using web 2.0 icons to the [...]
May 15th, 2008 at 9:20 am
A little late here as I’m just now getting around to picturing my posts.
You mention using FTP and coding within the server…would using the dashboard to upload and the code feature there do the same thing? Thu saving me a step or 2…
I do find it a bit ironic and deceiving, that the “title” feature in the dashboard actually adds the “alt”, not the title.
May 15th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Also, lets see if I got this…the TITLE tag is for humans…the ALT tag is for spiders?
May 15th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Dennis » As long as you understand the coding aspect to ensure that you’re using both the title and alt tags, it’s fine to upload in WordPress. I simply choose not to do that to better organize the photos that I use. Additionally, I don’t write or format any of my posts in the WordPress dashboard so it’s easier for me to hard code in my links and images during the formatting process.
And yes, you have the title and alt tags correct.
May 15th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Coding shouldn’t be a problem with your example above. I can just “insert code here” so to speak, matching your example to my stuff.
Woohoo I’m right! (must be the coffee).
OK then…whats the significance (or difference) in which keywords/phrases I use in either (title or alt) or if I use the same for both as in your example.
I hope that made sense :-)
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:06 am
[...] Can you target any keywords to bring in organic search traffic? [...]
July 11th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Question…when you say WordPress doesn’t insert an alt tag, are you talking about hosting at wordpress.com or wordpress.org? I have my blog at WordPress.com, and it does seem to insert an alt tag in the code on its own. I just tried it.
Thanks!
July 11th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Airtightnoodle » That information used to be valid for self-hosted WordPress blogs. It’s no longer the case and has been changed with new releases of WordPress since this post was written. :o)
Do double check however that you have both the alt and title tag. Because I hard code all of my links and images, I’m unsure if WordPress will include both in your link structure.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
great points. Also, the ‘width’ and ‘height’ tags are important -it tells image search what size your image is. And here lies my challenge: I have a blog (careful before you check it, it’s not entirely SFW) with lots of celebrity images. I use an image host, and so I embed hotlinked images to my own account there (much like blogger handles picasaweb). So only thumbnailed images appear on my blog, and when clicked the full HQ image is opened on the image host’s site. Now I am looking for a way to make image search understand what the actual image size is of the hosted image -by adding tags to the thumbnail SRC description. but this resizes the thumbnails, and is not an option.
So is there a way to make image search learn your hosted images’ true width and height do you think? Thanks!!
September 13th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I always had use the alt tag on my websites but I never really paid attention to it on my blogs, Thanks for this info as I will begin to use the alt tags in all my blogs.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
My own experience with some websites is that when I generate an sitemap and I list the sitemap on my website Google doesn’t index all of the pages quickly. But when I submit a sitemap in the Google Webmaster Tools then almost every page I submitted in the Google Webmaster Tools is listed in Google the next day. Of course there are exceptions, for instance when your website is old or has a high pagerank it wouldn’t hurt to submit a sitemap, but when you have a new website I think it is the best to keep it natural. Because with my own experience I can see every new website where I submitted an sitemap for didn’t show up in the first 1000 results, because I think it is or google sandboxed or it wasn’t natural because the pages didn’t get some linklove which is important.
November 21st, 2008 at 1:33 am
indexing of images also seems to open you up for people stealing your images, or at least using your image URLs and stealing bandwidth.
December 6th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Wow, very useful! Thanks!!
January 9th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
doy!
never realized you had to “opt” in to enhanced image search
now i know, and knowing is 1/2 the battle!
February 18th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
thanks for this post, i've always used alt tags but never realized i have to opt in to the image search… oops!
March 20th, 2009 at 10:29 am
i have got a reasonable traffic through images mainly because of optimization on images using ALT Tags.
March 23rd, 2009 at 12:58 am
I am with Florida mover on this one. I have used alt tags as well but never realized i need to opt in to the image search. One question I have though is by using the images on Google Image Search are any other copyrighted or are they all free game?
March 28th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Alt tag is definetly a must in SEO.