Almost a couple of weeks ago I thought I would experiment with photos. The goal was to improve an image in the search results of Google. Although this wasn’t the most scientific approach I still think it was interesting. So the test was to see if tagging an image with schema along with the usual SEO elements of images (i.e. alt tag, title tag, and naming structure) would help and improve the search results. Here is what I have found.
I started off by uploading a picture of me in a new blog post. It’s not as if I am incredibly self centered to perform such a test. After all an over interested desire to search for my name might make me a bit egocentric. I also updated the content of my about page to include the schema tag including a name below. I also add the usual SEO content which you can view the code in the previous blog post. Once I added the content I watched the SERPs daily. I included in my search terms Derek Hanson and in the url space &pws=0 which removes search personalized results. Here are what the results look like.
The image as seen is in the second page of search results. I checked the results nearly daily to see how would end up. I also include in the search terms &pws=0 to remove the personalized results. Within one week the image I tagged with schema was listed in the second page of Google search results. Within the near two week result Google had the image at the top of the second page while Bing shows up in the first page. So it seems that Bing actually appears in the search results quicker than Google.
Something I also noticed was LinkedIn images were well indexed in search results. Better than images in Twitter or Facebook. If you look at the code you will notice that there are similar schema tags for profile images as well as the content. Makes me wonder about the tag because it doens’t fit the standard. Perhaps it’s because the standard is fairly new.
h1>
span id="name" class="n fn"
span class="given-name">Derek /span
span class="family-name">Hanson /span
/span
The results perhaps are a bit unscientific but still interesting. Perhaps more tests are in order. If you’ve started using schema tags let me know how you use them. I would be interested in seeing what the results are.