SEO of photos

[wolfadeus]

Do you know of a good tutorial on how to SEO image contents, i.e. jpg photos?

A funny story: I do very solid, simple websites in full compliance with the Google webmaster guidelines and other simple SEO rules. Nothing special, built up with lots of advice and learning from WW and other sources.

I have a friend who works on many websites with related contents. We compete for high ranks at the SERPs, sometimes I win, sometimes he does.

The only big exception are photos - he scores fabulously at Google image search, wherewas I just cannot get my pictures rank well at all. They are often of much better quality than his. We have discussed this among the two of us, and have no clue what he does differently.

Perhaps you have any clues?

[engine]

Do you both have good filenames and alt tags?

[wolfadeus]

Yes. We are also both purists when it comes to code - not a line more than necessary. Resolution is comparable, so is file size.

[wolfadeus]

Oh, and neighbourhood, too - the pictures are the central elements in pages that otherwise feature only text, and the text contains a "normal" keyword density...

[wolfadeus]

Update: I told my friend about posting this here and we discussed the issue again; we ended up speculating to what extent the image files themselves might contain the "secret ingredient". My jpgs have no author information and tend to be bigger; GPS and other information is also missing, as I take them with a 12 year old digital SLR and post-process them with photoshop. Any thoughts about this?

[Leosghost]

As you don't say if his have any of that "meta" data ?...

[thecoalman]

and post-process them with photoshop. Any thoughts about this?

I don't use Photoshop so I don;t know it's behavior but generally the "save for web" option in image editors strips EXIF/IPTC data.

[wolfadeus]

I am not sure to what extent that meta-data is contained in his files, but I saw that Google is reading some information (photographer) into it - which is probably not written by the camera, but through the software licence information.

[onlineleben]

You can change the information contained in a photo manually. In windows, do a right-click on the picture and then in properties go to the details tab. enter whatever seo relevant data applies e.g. title, subject, comments, author and coypright info, camera specific data. Don't know if SEs can retrieve this kind of data, but it might be worth a try.

Added: seems this is only possible to jpg and tiff files. couldn't find a way to add this to gif or png files.

[wolfadeus]

Thank you, I didn't know that, but agree: worth a try.

[thecoalman]

If you want to read/write EXIF/IPTC I'd recommend Irfanview or Exifer. Both give you access to all the fields and have a lot more features like batch mode.

Irfanview itself is a tool everyone should have if they are manipulating images. It's a great utility for basic opertions.

[wolfadeus]

And it's freeware - thanks for the advice, I will try that.