Adding Images to a Sitemap

If you haven’t read our previous 101 Marketing Tip all about Sitemaps - I advise you to go back and read it now, otherwise none of this will make any sense to you. On the other hand, if you’ve been diligently digesting our Tips every month and have been paying attention- to the top of the class with you! I’ll issue you with a gold star after lunch.

Thanks to search engines now offering features where you can simply search for images alone, we are offered another host of opportunities for encouraging fresh traffic onto our websites via the images that we display on them. For example, if you have been eyeing up a shiny new laptop computer, or a holiday in the Maldives, chances are that you’re simply typed the make and model of the laptop or the hotel in the Maldives and had a good look at images of the products. But have you ever run a search for something specific, and when you’ve found that item, you’ve clicked on the results to make it bigger, and you can’t?

Usually, when you click an image in a search, for example in Google, you will be first taken to a screen with a bar across the top showing the search term used and a thumbnail of the photo you click on, and underneath that bar is the website that the image is from, so you can usually see the image in the context it was used within. The reason why you can’t always click through to a copy of the image alone, and the reason why you’re also taken through to the website where the image was originally used is because of the Sitemap coding of said image.

When the webmaster of the website has submitted their sitemap to the search engine, they’ve ensured that all of the images on their page are labelled accordingly within the coding, including the address of the picture itself, and the associated titles, captions and alt text. Like the general rule with Sitemaps- this does not ensure that your image will be returned in a result, but it significantly increases the chances of that happening, and if an internet user clicks on a photograph of your product with the correct description and coded text, then than encourages them to visit your site.

 

Image Sitemap Example

To do this, you can either create a new Sitemap or update an existing one, if you’re very good and have built and submitted one already. For each page you list on your Sitemap (that would be all of your pages!), make sure you include the additional information for each and every image on that page.

<?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>

   <image:image>

     <image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>

   </image:image>

 </url>

</urlset>

Don’t be daunted by the coding! If you have created a sitemap before, you’ll understand how it all works already, but in a nutshell, it is basically commands which tell the search engine what the image is and the accompanying titles and captions. For example:

<image:image> This header explains that there’s a lot of information on the way about an image- when you see this text repeated further down in the coding, it means the information for that image is enclosed between the two headers.
<image:loc> The address detailed after this is the URL of the images- in Layman’s terms, the address where you can see the image alone.
<image:caption> The caption of the image is detailed in this command.
<image:title> The title of the image goes after this header- bad website mastery can often be seen where the coding here has been added incorrectly, leading the image to be titled ‘00352.JPEG’ as opposed to a proper title.
 

 

Also don’t forget that after you’ve submitted your sitemap, you’ll need to allow a week or so to ensure that it’s been indexed.