How to SEO Your Images with Metadata
Do you want to discover a new SEO tactic that is very powerful in getting your images, websites and Places listings to the top of Google’s results?
The tactic is adding Metadata to your images and it is one of the many new SEO Strategies that we learned at last week’s Pubcon conference.
Some of the Metadata that you can imbed into your images includes:
- The version name
- The caption
- Keywords
- Copyright notice
- The image title
- And the GPS location of the image
In this example we added the Metadata into an image that now appears on the home page of WickenburgComputerRepair.com website
We loaded the image of the yellow building into Aperture and then opened the properties of the image and clicked on the Metadata tab.
From this screen you would add all your metadata and tag your image with the GPS location by either dragging the image to its Google Maps tool or typing the address directly into the Google Places tool.
In the above example we also have our metaviewer tool set to show all data so we can see the data as it is imbedded into the image.
Next you will want to control click (Mac) on the image to open the export option then select export to Master.
Now that your image has the metadata imbedded into the image, the next step would be to upload it to your website.
If you’re using WordPress as we are in this example, here are a couple SEO tips
- Be sure to add the Alternate text info (alt tag) using keywords
- Unless you want to have your image appear in a new window if it is clicked on, set the link URL to none
Now that your image is optimized for SEO by adding the metadata you can right click on the image, save it to your computer and check the metadata information-using Aperture to make certain that all the parameters are correct.
If you have a PC you can use Microsoft’s Pro Photo Tools to add your Metadata to your images.
SEO Tutorial in PDF
If you’re interested, you can download this SEO tutorial on How to Optimize your images with metadata in PDF and you’re welcome to share it with your friends.
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Comments
4 Responses to How to SEO Your Images with Metadata
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sweet spot.
aperture seems to be for mac users. what’s the equivalent tool for pc users
Lynne
@lynne I haven’t used it but told that Microsoft’s Pro Photo Tools will work for PC’s
Radarroy:
While adding embedded metadata is a good practice (to protect the intellectual property of your photos), I missed the part where this adds to your Search Engine Optimization for the site. Last I checked, none of the spiders for the search engines actually read the embedded metadata within images; or if they do, do not use that information in ranking/rating pages.
If you have a way to automatically extract the embedded information and make it visisble on the page (as perhaps is being done with your wordpress then it might be a useful practice. However, if you are only doing this for SEO purposes, you will get better results simply placing a visible caption below the image on the web page.
BTW, for the example you gave for the Wickenburg Computer Repair http://bit.ly/sYOvYx , note that the Save for Web and Devices in Adobe Photoshop CS5 only saves the photo metadata in the XMP metadata format (http://www.photometadata.org/META-101-metadata-types), and not all applications can see this info after downloading (Aperture 3 can, but many older applications don’t).
For those that are interested, see the following article on my site… “Why Embedded Photo Metadata Won’t Help Your SEO (at least without some help)” at http://www.controlledvocabulary.com/blog/embedded-metadata-wont-help-seo.html for details.
David
@David – Thank you for your post and I have just completed reading your post.
The 1st time I ever heard about “Geo Tagging” your images was at a seminar with David Mihm of Get Local: http://www.seotrainingsw.com/2010/12/how-do-you-rank-a-phone-book/
So we started this practice then uploading the images to clients Flickr accounts, and noticed them appearing in the organic results for their keyword.
Then last week learned of this method of metadata embedding at Pubcon from a local search consultant using Aperture, thus this post.
It’s clear from Matt Cutts keynote at Pubcon that Google is getting smarter at spidering java however the subject of image metadata never came up.
Since this post we have tried this technique on several sites and on Google Places accounts and I’m curious myself if we will begin noticing any increase in rankings or indexing of the images.
Also thank you for sharing that you can also use Photoshop, will try that too.