Image Optimization for Visual Search Results - Rule Number 3: General Presentation
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Try to avoid setting images using CSS or JavaScript if SEO is an important factor. When using images as part of the content of your site always embed them directly on the page with a standard HTML image tag. If your image is set dynamically with either CSS or JavaScript, the spiders indexing your site will not know that the image is there and it will therefore be impossible for them to index and pointless for you to optimize. This obviously doesn't apply for images that are used in your site that don't form part of the page content, things like roll-overs in a navigation menu for example, or heading images.
You should also make sure that the image has appropriate and relevant text in the near vicinity, especially on pages with a lot of images on them. Crawlers will also look at the elements surrounding an image, so a nice block of descriptive text, in addition to a linked full-size image and perhaps a caption, will ensure that the search engines know what the picture represents.
The directory structure, or folder hierarchy, of your web site is also important if your want your images indexed by the search engines. First of all, make sure the folder or folders that your images reside in on the web server is accessible to bots and spiders. Make sure a permissions entry or robots.txt file is not obstructing them in any way, and try not to make the paths to the files too deep. Something like www/mysite/images is going to be more accessible than www/mysite/content/images/products/cameras/Kodak/8mp/ for example.
To Conclude
I'm sure it goes without saying that the page your optimized image is being used on has also been optimized for search engines, but if it's not then it should be as all of your efforts optimizing the image will be wasted. Optimizing images is almost always secondary to optimizing that actual content on the site itself, and why go to the trouble of optimizing images on a poorly optimized site?
If your image appears high in the SERPs for an image search, this will often lead to a visit to your site from the searcher and forms another route into your site from targeted traffic, so having your images rank well in image SERPs can only be a positive thing for your site. Optimizing images needs only a little thought and preparation. By applying the rules as the image is created you can save yourself time and effort later on, so follow these simple rules to keep your images in favor with the search engines and your visitors.
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