How To Opt In For Google Image Search

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Here’s a quick tip for getting your images listed in Google Image Search. There’s no need to actually submit your images to Google Search. They will be crawled by Googlebot next time your site is indexed. You can however update your sitemap.xml file to include more data that can then be used to categorize your image as bots cannot read embedded text.

What is sitemap.xml

If you have a dynamic website like this one you will want to include a sitemap that updates whenever your content does. Even if you’re not a power blogger submitting 10 articles a day your site should still have a sitemap. Sitemaps are used by the search engines to navigate your content. It’s in your best interest to give them all the information you can.

If you don’t know anything about writing xml don’t worry. You can generate your own sitemap.xml page here. Or if you’re using WordPress the Google XML Sitemaps is the plugin you will need.

Use Niche Keywords in Your Naming Conventions

This is a quick, but necessary step right here. Name your images appropriately. Call them what they are. If you have a picture of a basketball game call it something like pistons-basket-ball.jpg. If the search engines didn’t have any more information about your image it could still be pulled up in relevant searches.

The Code

Now that your sitemap has been generated and you have your image naming conventions down pat lets add some extra code to help the spiders better index our images. Your sitemap should look something like this.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
  xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
 <url>
   <loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
   <image:image>
     <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
   </image:image>
   <image:image>
     <image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
   </image:image>
 </url> 
</urlset>

You can also add the following tags to better describe your image.

image:image – Encloses all information about a single image. Each URL ( tag) can include up to 1,000, “image:image”, tags.
image:loc – The URL of the image.
image:caption – The caption of the image.
image:geo_location – The geographic location of the image. For example, Limerick, Ireland.
image:title – The title of the image.
image:license – A URL to the license of the image.

When your xml is done properly it should something like this. You now have 4 more options to better tag your content.

<url>
   <loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
   <image:image>
     <image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
   </image:image>
   <image:image>
     <image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
     <image:caption>This is my really cool photo</image:caption>
     <image:geo_location>Detroit, MI</image:geo_location>
     <image:title>Cool Pic</image:title>
     <image:license>http://creativecommons.org/</image:license>
   </image:image>
 </url> 
</urlset>

Google Webmaster Tools

Now when you’re done writing your xml upload it to the root of your server. Then log in to Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done so already add a site. Here you will be asked if you have a sitemap to promote. Click yes once it’s submitted the bots will be scheduled to re-crawl your site and accept all your new meta data.

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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here.