Jeff Swanson

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Search engines have come a long way in the last few years. Blended search has come to fruition, which means we are no longer just searching for Web pages, but all kinds of content including images, blogs, videos, products, etc. Because blended search is so prominent, it’s important to make sure all of your content is indexed. This post will focus on how to get your images indexed by Google so that they will appear in Google Images and hopefully in regular searches as well.

The secret to getting your images indexed is simple – optimize them. I suggest the following:

• Use an appropriate alt tag on all images
• Give each image a title
• Add image height and width in img tag
• Name the file using a relevant keyword (dashes between words)

If you have some extra time on your hands, check out this blog post for additional image optimizations tips.

Another point that needs attention is making sure your images can be found by search spiders. Make sure to check your robots.txt file to see if you are preventing any spiders from crawling parts of your sites that have images you want in the index.

Google Webmaster Tools gives you the option to have your images crawled, but whether or not they are prominent in the results will depend on optimization. Also, be patient. It can take months before your images are indexed properly by Google, which is all the more reason to get this done as soon as you can so you can benefit from some additional traffic.