Image SEO in 2013

[Hospitality-SEO]

3.26.13

Everything I can find on image SEO is relatively dated and some that I do don't explain exactly what should be done.

1. When designing a site it is easier to simply integrate best practices from the get go. So what are the best practices?

• Alt tags - these are to explain the photo for handicapped individuals but you can naturally weave in a good keyword.
• Image titles - do these matter?
• URL of the jpg - should we put in a good keyword here?
• What about schema?
• What about Meta tags for the page the pic loads on?
• What about pinning to Pinterest and what is properly pulled over?
• What about other social channels and sharing?

What am I missing? Who out there has the ultimate guide for optimizing images in 2013?

Thank you!

[TakeshiYoung]

I don't know of any ultimate guides, but I can answer your questions:

1. ALT Tags - This is the most important property for SEO. Use your keywords here.
2. Image Title - This has zero SEO value for Google, but can provide a good user experience
3. URL of JPG - This has SEO impact, use a relevant name:" keyword-keyword.jpg" not "IMG00001.jpg"
4. Schema - I haven't seen any concrete studies, but semantic markup helps Google determine what the image is about, so it can potentially help. Use it if it makes sense.
5. Meta Tags - Meta tags don't matter
6. Pinterest - Pinterest pulls all images on a page automatically as long as they are bigger than 80x80 pixels
7. Other social - Facebook Opengraph tags are great because they allow you to specify what image will be used when your content is shared on FB. However, it has no impact on SEO.

Other factors for image SEO: People linking to the image, the content surrounding the image (should be related to your image), the overall theme of your site (should be related to the image), use large, high quality images.

I think that about covers it.