Part Of: Full Stack SEO Best Practices
Published:
by Wayne Smith
Images and other off-page URLs are made relevant or optimized by the content on the pages that use or link to the URL. The image SEO can both receive relevancy from the page and give relevancy to the page. Using schema to provide the creator attribute is highly recommended. The file name, alt tag, schema, and potentially the exif of the file are all optimizable.
While I would rather not write best practices like a textbook. The attribution, or metadata of the image becomes important and is important to most uses of Image SEO. So it must be looked at first.
Google recommends using Schema for the metadata to attribute the image to the publisher, owner, and creator's entity. A URL for licensing the image is also required, (not a schema-required value but a Google-required value). The minimum schema is shown by Google at image-license-metadata under developers search docs.
The license and acquireLicensePage URLs can be the same URL but are required for Google's usage.
... Entity SEO the additional schema data points ...
The copyright holder AKA "creator" schema can be a person or other entity like a company. Google's E-E-A-T ties into the entity data points; We are considering E-E-A-T as a long-term best practice, at the time this page is published E-E-A-T is not a major factor in ranking but in the future, it has the potential ... A URL can provide a "hidden gems" signal for quality importance for image SEO.
A person or company can also use the sameAs, which can appear either under the profile page for the creator "https://example.com/about/brownstone" or in the metadata schema for the image. It does not need to be in both places but signals to Google that the user engagement of these Web 2.0 sites can be used as a ranking signal. There is a maintenance advantage to which schema is used to provide the sameAs data points.
A publisher can also be used which provides a larger set of E-E-A-T data points.
About can also be used to unambiguously point to the entities the creative work is referring to.
A name can also be used ... the verbose image schema becomes ...
... Verbose schema is not required ...
For proper attribution, only the Google-recommended Schema can be used. The entity relationships and what it is about should be able to be assembled by other clues, but it is a good practice for image SEO to provide it.
An image becomes more important and ranks better when it is shared or embedded on additional pages. The attribution is important as Google can use it to identify the source of the image and the link provides image SEO for the search to attribute back to the original page or publisher.
Assuming the image is shared on https://www.pinterest.com/BrixtonBrownstone/ with the title "Black labrador puppy," the image and the page that published the image will benefit image SEO. Each Pinterest share becomes another link and shows user engagement for the image. The content on Pinterest's title, description, and comments provide relevant keywords about the image.
The alt tag is used by those who can not see the page, including robots to determine what the image is about. It should be used on all images that are part of the content of the page.
Exif data allows for attribution of the copyright holder, this attribution is lacking the "license" URLs. Google also uses OCR to read any letters on the image.
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