How To Generate Image Sitemap

Image Sitemap Builder

What Is An Image Sitemap?

Similar to a normal XML sitemap and the way it presents your web pages in a hierarchical manner, an image sitemap is a raw web page which lists the exact links of your images in a well-structured format. As you know, the main goal of a normal XML sitemap is to transfer valuable information about each of your web pages to Googlebots. Examples of these data are the location of a web page, its last time modification, its change frequency, and its importance and priority in relation to other pages. In contrast, a sitemap file for images tell the bots about the following critical issues (which will be explained in later parts):

• The type of image
• The subject of the image
• The geographical location of the image
• The image title
• The image caption
• The image license

Generally speaking, you can add your images to an already generated sitemap, or simply you can make a new sitemap exclusively designed for the images you have within your web pages. So, it is completely up to you to choose between the two options.

When you create sitemap for images and introduce it to Google, you will have the chance to inform Google and other search engines about your images, enlarging the likelihood that they will be displayed in Google image search results. Indeed, drawing on the features of an image sitemap, you can provide precious information about all the images available on your website for different search engines. The provided information by the image sitemap file pave the way for Google easily understand which images on the site you want to be crawled and indexed. Obviously, without the related information, some of your images will not be unveiled and indexed by Google or any other search engines.

What Do The Image Sitemap Tags Mean?

1. <image: image>

As one of the main essential tags in an image sitemap, the tag encompasses all the required information about a single image within a certain web page. For every url tag, up to 1000 image, <image: image> tag can be defined.

2. <image: loc>

This obligatory tag indicates the exact URL of the image. Sometimes this URL may not be on the same domain as the main site. In such cases, you are strongly required to check whether both URLs are verified in the Search Console and also make sure that your robots.txt file is open for crawling any kind of content.

3. <image: caption>

As the name implies, the image caption is embedded in this tag. Keep in mind that the caption tag is not mandatory and you can use it as your wish.

  

4. <image: geo_location>

This is an optional tag which indicates where the image has been taken (the geographical location of the image).

5. <image: title>

Using this optional tag, you will be able to tell Google about what the image is titled for.

6. <image: license>

If the image disappeared on the web page is not authentically yours, you can place the URL to its source or license so as to observe the copyrights of the original publisher.

Why Do You Need To Have An Image Sitemap For Your Website?

In case you are determined about the performance of your website in Google image search, nothing will remarkably be beneficial for your website traffic than Image sitemaps. As said before, every day Google records an infinite number of queries which are directly or indirectly related to images. Suppose that you own a consultation company and recently have launched an exclusive website for your business. Naturally, you are required to be a text provider rather than an image publisher in such a website, aren’t you?

However, what if your site is an online store for women? Now, you are 100% sure that you need to provide charming images for the users in order to make them your potential customers. In this image heavy-image website, you should keep checking to make sure that your images are 1) adequately optimized for Google image search, and 2) included in a separate image sitemap or integrated in a normal XML sitemap. Otherwise, Google will face many difficulties while finding your images, and you will likely lose valuable traffic that can effectively be generated for your website. This is surely a disappointing disaster, isn’t it?

How Can You Generate An Image Sitemap?

Based on what is said in Google Webmaster Central Blog, you can manually build the sitemap required for your images on your own website through the use of Google sitemap extensions for Images (image sitemap specific tags). You can also utilize an online sitemapgeneration tool which is able to automatically create image sitemap for your website.

You may want to spend time on building your image sitemap manually, but logically, it is not an ideal kind of job someone plane to do in the afternoon. Due to the probable bugs and problems a manual sitemap creation process can face you with, and also the time it takes to code the script needed for image sitemap generation, it’s more logical to choose the latter, that is making your image sitemap with an automatic sitemap generator for images.

Generate Your Image Sitemap With Hexseotools.com

If you decide to use automatic image sitemap maker, we proudly recommend you to generate the suitable image sitemap for your website via Hexseotools image sitemap generator. This easy-to-use image sitemap builder is able to build a separate sitemap file that organize your images’ required information for Google. This way, the images existed within your web pages will more likely to be in the index box of Google and all other search engines. In addition, if you want to integrate your images with your standard XML sitemap, you just need to let the generator know; it starts to crawl your URLs and all images available on them. Then, it automatically adds the Google sitemap extensions for images to the XML sitemap file based on the information collected by Googlebots.

All you need is to provide your website URL for our tool and select image sitemap generator check box. Keep in mind that contrary to standard XML sitemap generation, making an image sitemap is not free of charge even for less than 500 links.