Image is not picked up by search engines....

Hi Everyone...

My images are not being picked up by the search engines.....can you please tell me what am I doing wrong here... ? :(

For example I have an image with a caption of "Fallen" here http://www.rajeevthomas.com/viewgall...p?cid=3&pid=12

But when I search this image in google.com as "Fallen rajeevtomas.com" this image won't show up....

On another website of a professional photographer (Guy Tal) (he has the same kind of link structure or non seo friendly link structure) but if I do a search for an image like this with its name it shows up in google.com search page....

Here is the example , searching for image called 'on the range" Image Search

And it shows up like this link http://guytal.com/gtp/gallery/image....d=light&iidx=9

I don't know if this needs to mentioned, but I just recently added the image title to each html pages that is generated... I don't know if that's going to affect the search results on google.com....

It takes a while for Google to index content, and you don't have a lot of influence over how Google does that indexing. Also, new stuff often appears way down the list in searches. If you really want these images to be searchable, one thing you should do is name the image something like "fallen-tree.jpg" rather than "12.jpg", as the image file name is important.

Ralph.... thank you very much for your response. I will wait for Google to index the pages then. I am also working on changing the .php generated file names to seo friendly names.. :)

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Originally Posted by yathrakaaran

Hi Everyone...

My images are not being picked up by the search engines.....can you please tell me what am I doing wrong here... ? :(

For example I have an image with a caption of "Fallen" here http://www.rajeevthomas.com/viewgall...p?cid=3&pid=12

But when I search this image in google.com as "Fallen rajeevtomas.com" this image won't show up....

On another website of a professional photographer (Guy Tal) (he has the same kind of link structure or non seo friendly link structure) but if I do a search for an image like this with its name it shows up in google.com search page....

Here is the example , searching for image called 'on the range" Image Search

And it shows up like this link http://guytal.com/gtp/gallery/image....d=light&iidx=9

I don't know if this needs to mentioned, but I just recently added the image title to each html pages that is generated... I don't know if that's going to affect the search results on google.com....

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Yes it is true that when the search engine crawler crawls your site images are not taken into account. So you should never bother about the images you are posting.

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Originally Posted by simonefletcher

Yes it is true that when the search engine crawler crawls your site images are not taken into account. So you should never bother about the images you are posting.

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Hm, have you ever done a Google image search? You might get a surprise. :)

Sorry simonefletcher, that's bad advice.

In terms of optimising images, look at the file path (as mentioned above) and <alt> tags.

Your alt tag is currently this.....

alt='Fallen' /></a>

I'd look at changing this to something more "tree" related.

1. Don't be disappointed. Many of your pictures have been already indexed by google.
Check it here:
http://images.google.com/search?sour...YCwBg&tbm=isch

If this link does not work, simply search in google images this:
site:http://www.rajeevthomas.com

2. The image in a page can't be indexed if the page has not been indexed.

Indexing and ranking at Google depends heavily of backlinks. Your site has only a few backlinks and some of them are no follow (useless for ranking).

I suggest you to collect many more dofollow backlinks to your site.

3. When the page has been indexed, the image has to have a Alt tag since the latter acts as keyword for search engine. Alt tag is essential for indexing image. You should review the content of the tags. The tag should the keyword of the image (no keywords stuffing).

furthermore, I am not sure your tag works properly since I do not see it when the mouse goes on your picture. I do not know what is wrong (my PC or your tag).

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Originally Posted by jasmina

furthermore, I am not sure your tag works properly since I do not see it when the mouse goes on your picture. I do not know what is wrong (my PC or your tag).

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The alt text should only be displayed if the image can't be, for whatever reason. Internet Explorer incorrectly shows the alt text when you hover over an image, but other browsers do not. If you want text to display on hover, you can add the title attribute to your images.

@Mr.Wolf... I did just change code so that 'alt' tags correctly displays with tag words.... thank you. Jasmina... thank you for the detailed reply. I did not know anything about 'backlinks'... I need to learn that. Are the alt tags supposed to be shown as we hover over images? Does that help search engines to pick up images? The images that are indexed already..(thnak you for the serach results) They are just the images from site's slideshow. The others in the gallery haven't been indexed yet may be? My images are generated by php ...is that a problem? Does that make it hard for search engines to pick up the images?
@TechnoBear..thank you!! Right now ,IE shows the tag words but Firefox shows my link path! What is the correct way? Are tags supposed to be shown as we hover over? I have seen some websites with 'title' attribute also.... am I am supposed to do that? or is that a preference? Thank you for the help...

Search engines will use the alt text to help them index images. Browsers should not display the alt text on hover; as far as I know, the only one which does is IE. The only thing browsers should display on hover is a title, if present; including the title is optional. The main purpose of alt text is to replace the image if, for some reason, it cannot be viewed. The alt text will be read out to a blind user by their assistive technology, as will any title. If you do decide to use titles, then bear this in mind and don't use the same text for both alt text and title. As ever, build your site with your human visitors in mind, not the search engines. :)

Great advice TechnoBear!! Thank you so much! :)

Great as your images may be, and they are indeed very good, from a pure seo point of view, your site is a disaster because in "Google's eyes" it contains very little relevant, topical,useful information.
It would be fairly simple to make a spectacular improvement in ranking by "redesigning" your site in something that is topical, structured and with a small amount of written, relevant info for each image.

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Originally Posted by benbob

Great as your images may be, and they are indeed very good, from a pure seo point of view, your site is a disaster because in "Google's eyes" it contains very little relevant, topical,useful information.
It would be fairly simple to make a spectacular improvement in ranking by "redesigning" your site in something that is topical, structured and with a small amount of written, relevant info for each image.

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Hi benbob..thank you for your reply. I am a total newbie in 'SEO' world... so I hope you don't mind me asking what do you mean by 'your site is a disaster'? Why do you say 'there is very little information'...what information is supposed to be there? And where ? On every page after every image or on the image head tags? After listening to the others here I was able to add an image title and keywords. On a positive note, after doing that some images are showing up in Google search :)

Google ranks sites according to the information they provide. As your site comprises for 90+% of images, the algorithms will judge it as very low useful information supply. You could be the world's number one winner of photo awards and display all your best photos, but algorithms would not be impressed.

To improve your seo results, each photo should have some photo comments, wording things like why the image is what it is, how you took the photo and so on.