Having travelled far and wide of late, I wanted to share my pictures with
my friends. Being a web developer always looking for the SEO edge, I
thought to myself, how can I best share these images and the world at
large. I decided on Picasa for ease of use (check my 30 second Picasa review here.) Since images are key to your site both
from a user experience and an SEO perspective, I thought I should share
some of my considerations.
Please post your thoughts below in the comments section and I’ll elaborate
on anything I glossed over.
Image SEO 101
Chris Pearson has a great introduction to Image SEO in the article
describing how he got 53% more searches through image SEO.
- Get Ranked Quickly.
- Be Compliant.
- Width
- Height
- Alt
- Src
- Title
Few sites are images-optimized, take advantage!
Make sure you have the following attributes covered:
Picassa Image SEO Theory
Now, I’m new to Picasa, not SEO. After uploading nearly 1000 photos from my
iPhone I started to wonder if there’s any SEO benefit I could derive from
putting all of that media out there. I am investigating WordPress plugins
so I can make use of the media. I also have a sense that since Google owns
Picasa, there should be something I could do to get a traffic bump.
Picassa Image SEO Reality
My first stop was Google. I figured that someone had to have written on
this topic somehow before. I was hoping for a special, magic blackhat sort
of tip like the one that used to work in Flickr. Sadly, everything I found
talked about geotagging, facial recognition, etc. Nice for your photos, not
so nice for conferring ranking juice to your site.
your Flickr account AND have it count in Search Engine points. That
practice was somewhat curtailed. You can still get a ton of site traffic
from Flickr but the SEO benefit has been all but removed. Some developers
are It sounds like the best that I can do is to make a robust Picasa/Google
profile, geotag my pictures with location, tag each album with good
keywords, and label my Picasa albums well, and hope for a ping effect.
Google wants to be (and remain) the king of search and since Images are
items that are often searched, you can expect that they’ll continue their
efforts on facial recognition, location awareness, etc.
Checking in with the Experts
Whenever I’ve got a question that’s been irking me, I reach out to my
network. Lucky for me, Grant Simmons of Digital Strategy is in my network. He
gave me permission to extensively quote from his comprehensive response.
Check it out! Blockquotes below are all his.
Google and Images
No one knows the full extent of Googles efforts to date (apart from some
Googlers), but they’ve certainly started to review images for content,
identifying faces etc. Their stated goal is to have a robust image indexing
as part of search results relevance, so every little bit of optimization
can help.
Embeddin Picasa Images in Your Site
You can host the images anywhere and embed the image – Picasa provides embed code:
<table style="width:auto;">
<tr><td>
<a
href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/L2QOecAZM--5I7tKzjFjAQ?authkey=Gv1sRgCN_R0aThrd6N_AE&feat=embedwebsite">
<img
src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/_8JVUSuBi4UQ/SejZWjkgoUI/AAAAAAAAAC0/RPsTIbm4fM8/s800/grant-simmons-headshot_bigger.jpg"
/>
</a></td></tr>
<tr><td style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;
font-size:11px; text-align:right">From
<a
href="http://picasaweb.google.com/simmonetmarketing/BloggerPictures?authkey=Gv1sRgCN_R0aThrd6N_AE&feat=embedwebsite">Blogger
Pictures</a>
</td></tr></table>
Optimizing Picassa Embedded Images
You can certainly optimize the image link, and the file name. We recommend
Overall, the basic elements of SEO work wherever the images are hosted.
also adding a caption and some other descriptive text on the page relevant
to the image contents.
In the End
Alternatively, using Picasa’s hosted solution *can* get photos ranking in
the their universal search results.. adding a caption and getting some
comments is about all you can do (above and beyond the image name
optimization) but it can work.