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

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.