Although Search Engines cannot view or understand images, they are still an important part of your website, you can optimise your images to have a better chance of appearing in a search engines image results. It is important you make images more understandable to the search engines, especially images you consider to be important to your websites content. You may have important images on your website that are only accessible using JavaScript forms, or pages that have a lot of images however not all of them relevant to the pages content.
Yesterday Google announced on their official webmaster blog that you can now include images in your sitemap to inform the search engine robots which images are important to your website.For each URL page you have in your Sitemap, you can also put in information about relevant images on that particular page.
For example:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:image=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1″>
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
