Hi everyone,
I'm hoping for some advice on how to improve the indexing of images on my site.
My site is about loft conversions, and currently ranks on the first page for the search term loft conversions. Its an established site and has been on the first page for quite some time.
So while I'm very pleased with how the site is doing, I'm not having much sucess with the images. All the images on my site are unique and original. I only seem to have a few images indexed and they are appearing nowhere in the results.
Take a look at this for an example - page with loft conversion images
I'm using lightbox to display the images and I wonder if this is what is causing the problem.
Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly apreciated
I run a website that provides information and resources for anyone thinking about a loft conversion in their home.
Here is the response I received from the image indexing team:
~B
*I no longer work for Bing.
One suggestion is to correct DNS errors shown here:
intodns.com/aboutloftconversions.co.uk
DNS errors can create problems for SE bots in crawling a site.
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The linked web page took ages to load, so I gave up. However, giving your images descriptive names with target keywords will help ranking on SERPs. Names like image001.gif or 101.jpg won't bring the result you desire. Also use "ALT" tags to label your images. Linking to them internally and from external sites will help ranking as well.
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Hi, thanks for the feedback. Those DNS errors are not causing any issues for the SE bots crawling my site, its fully crawled and indexed.
The example page I linked to was cached by Bing on 23/02/3010
Quality Directory: The linked web page took ages to load, so I gave up. However, giving your images descriptive names with target keywords will help ranking on SERPs. Names like image001.gif or 101.jpg won't bring the result you desire. Also use "ALT" tags to label your images. Linking to them internally and from external sites will help ranking as well.
I'm concerned that the page was slow to load, I've just tried it and it loaded fine for me. If you get a chance could you try again and see if the problem is still there?
Images all have descriptive names, alt tags and title tags.
I could try geting some more external links - thanks for the suggestion.
The site loaded fine for me the second time around. I noticed you name your images like "steel-rsj-small.jpg" and "pre-con1-small.jpg". How do you expect names like that to appear on image search? Do you think people are searching for "Steel RSG Small" or "Pre Con1 Small"? That's not my idea of descriptive and keyword-rich names.
Hi Directory,
Pleased to hear the site loaded ok, maybe the server was having issues when you last tried, thanks for trying again.
Here's another example that might help explain the problem better:
Take a look at this page about loft conversion stairs
The image that is displayed on the page is called staircase-10-small.jpg
When you click on it, a lightbox is used to display another image called staircase-10.jpg
Ignoring what people search for, my concern is that the images are not being indexed becasue fo the lightbox.
The links above go directly to the images, my concern is that the SE's are not finding them due to the javascript used for the lightbox effects.
Maybe I should try putting links to the images in my site map?
If your images load by making some strange script calls, it will be had for search engine crawlers to crawl and index them. I'm not used to lightbox and doesn't know how it works.
I've never tried linking to my images from sitemaps, so I can't give any authoritative suggestion.
Hi QD,
Thanks for the reply, I'll take the advice on board and tidy up the image names and have a go at putting links to the images in the sitemap and see that improves things.
I feel humbled to have made some useful contributions, and good luck!
john_essex: Hi QD, Thanks for the reply, I'll take the advice on board and tidy up the image names and have a go at putting links to the images in the sitemap and see that improves things.
Hi Brett,
Thanks for taking the time to speak with the indexing team and reply to my post, your help is very much appreciated. I'm pleased to hear that Bing has been able to index the images from the site.
I understand that other sites linking to my images will help with rankings, but you also mention about images being reused by other sites, could you expand on that a little?
I have been thinking about releasing my images on flickr (or similar site) for anyone to be able to re-use. I'm wondering how this would help with my rankings? Would it be simply because other users would link back to me, or is because Bing has some clever way to track how images are used?
Thanks again,
John