Put Images in Your XML Sitemaps Part II – AKA: The Part I left Out.

Images in Sitemaps to crawl them better for image search

Spiders Crawl Image URL's in Sitemaps

If you were left with questions after the last post it was because I never got to give examples of the formatting of images in your sitemap.  Hopefully people just googled it if they were serious, already knew, didn’t care, ad nauseum of reasons, and in case you didn’t we got you covered with this thrilling follow up post.  Taken straight from Google here, this is what the syntax would look like for one page that includes two images.  You can add up to 1,000 images per page by the way, just in case you have a page with over 1k images, you have been officially PWND by Google when it comes to adding all your images on that page to your sitemap, pfffft.

<?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>

While this is a boilerplate format, the following is a table, again, taken from Google’s page on including image url’s in your xml sitemaps of what is required and what is optional.  The above example doesn’t include all of the variables listed below.

Tag Required Description
<image:image> Yes Encloses all information about a single image. Each URL (<loc> tag) can include up to 1,000 <image:image> tags.
<image:loc> Yes The URL of the image.
<image:caption> Optional The caption of the image.
<image:geo_location> Optional The geographic location of the image. For example, <image:geo_location>Limerick, Ireland</image:geo_location>.
<image:title> Optional The title of the image.
<image:license> Optional A URL to the license of the image.

Technorati Tags: image sitemaps, Sitemaps, xml

About Geoff Simon

Geoff is owner/operator of Simon Search Marketing. He graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration from California State Polytechnic University in 2003 and got an account coordinator job with GREY Global's west coast direct marketing arm (Grey Direct West, now G2 Direct & Digital) working for Bank of Americas online banking division. From there Geoff has worked in a search marketing capacity for companies including Intermark Group, Disney Interactive Media Group, SSPR and others. Brands worked on include Disney Family, Toyota Dealers Association, National Geographic, Red Bull USA Events, That '70s Show and Carsey Werner.
Geoff likes ice-hockey, is a Chicago native and proud dad to his almost 1-year old son Cyrus.
Find Geoff on Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, or follow his Twitter handle @geoff_simon

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