How to Optimize a Photo Gallery for Google

We all know Google Images can also be a huge source of traffic if your image ranks for a keyword that has a high search volume. For a Photo Gallery or an image blog it’s very hard to optimize the page which contains lots of images. Google is yet to find a way to recognize the contents of a image. That is why the image optimization is must and takes little more work that optimizing a text based webpage.

• ALT Tag
  Alt tag is one of the most important factors for ranking a image. It is like the description of the image and actually tells Google what the image is about. For example, alt=”Lucy, my pet cat”.
• Title Tag
  Title tag is more like an anchor text. It is the name of the image and tells Google about the keyword to rank. For example title=”Sunrise at Tiger Hill”.
• Surrounding Content
  Since Google does not recognize the elements in an image, surrounding contents, like a text based description helps Google to determine the topic of the content and find the keywords in it. Being said, you must put the keyword that you want to rank in the description.
• Meta Description
  It is to tell Google about the content of the page, not the image. If you cannot add content anywhere near the image, you should add it in meta description. The chances of getting a good rank only with meta description is poor, but you still stand it.
• Image Size
  It means how much bandwidth it takes. Normally, small sized images ranks better than same image with larger size. If you have a heavy weight images, it’s better to use a thumbnail and optimize that.
• Image Dimensions
  It helps Google to index and cache your images better.
• User Activity
  If you enable public comments on your images, it’ll increase the text based content on your image page and will help Google to recognize the image better. For example, comments like “Wow, that’s a nice photo of sunrise” will push the image higher for the keywords like “sunrise” or “photos of sunrise”. You probably noticed that photo sharing websites like Flickr or Webshots has comments enabled.