With the release of Google Real Estate in Australia and them pushing the emphasis back onto the agents website I though I would provide some timely tips to help optimise your website images. They say every little bit helps!
Pictures clearly have an advantage over words. Agents deliver images to potential customers that may have no means of viewing that property. Why not tag these images correctly.
This is what a typical image code would look like [img src=””/images/192a/94736.jpg”” alt=””image”/”]. Clearly, a search engine robot has no way of categorizing this image. There is no information for it to file this image under other than it is an image.
Here are 3 simple procedures you or your photographer can do to get your images ranking on the first page of search engines.
Lets create another format of the above image code and add some information that will enable the image to be categorized.
- give the image the name of the property address including the suburb
- utilize the “alt” tag and put the property address including suburb in
- reference the code directly from your website
The new code should look like this:
[img src=””http://www.yourwebaddress.com.au/images/27-oakland-drive-sydney.jpg” alt=””24″]
For added points include the image width and height.
[img src=””http://www.yourwebaddress.com.au/images/27-oakland-drive-sydney.jpg” alt=””24″ width=””400”” height=”“300”/”]
I have used this technique successfully. Type “mobile phone websites” in Google and go to the images tab. I have images in positions 1, 4, 10 and 14 on the first page.
4 Comments
Greg Vincent
Great post Peter. The images are sitting on the web anyway, agents might as well optimise them.
Your example demonstrates an important part of image optimising that agents should be mindful of…
It’s important to use 27-oakland-drive-sydney. rather than 27oaklanddrivesydney because Google will recognise 27oaklanddrivesydney as one word & the image won’t appear if someone types in 27 Oakland Drive Sydney.
The hyphen is used to separate the words because you can’t use spaces.
Having an image that is optimised for 27 Oakland Drive Sydney, sitting on a page that is also optimised for 27 Oakland Drive Sydney will help the webpage rank better too.
Peter Farrell
Thanks Greg…there is one omission in the post. The “alt” tag text should be the address of the property. 27 Oakland Drive Sydney without the hyphens in this one.
Nick
Uhh can I just point out that the sample code doesnt have alt or title tags at all?
And keyword stuffing image urls is pointless and irritating from a code point of view.
Google can use it, but given a good alternative text, it will ignore the filename.
The primary, and technically correct way of tagging images is with alt= and title= only.
Peter Farrell
You are right Nick it does not have alt or title tags…why i do not know..because they where there when i submitted the article to business2. however, i did make a note of this in my previous comment.
No one is “keyword stuffing” here. I am simply suggesting the agent put in the address of the property.