For many types of businesses, visual imagery is a big part of marketing. If your business relies heavily on imagery (i.e. food, fashion, design or home decor) presenting this imagery to prospects can help increase your sales. Search engines like Google.com, Yahoo.com and Bing.com will often display images to their users' queries. By getting your product images in these search results, you increase your chances of making incremental sales. Implementing an image sitemap can help you do this.

How to make an image sitemap

To create an image sitemap, start by creating an XML sitemap. Below is the starting code of a sample XML site map. If you want to learn more about XML sitemaps read How do I Make an XML Site Map?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
        <loc>www.myfashionwebsite.com</loc>
   </url>
   <url>
        <loc>www.myfashionwebsite.com/shoes.html</loc>
   </url>
</urlset>

<image:image> & <image:loc> Tags

If a website page contains images that you would like to appear in search results, you will need to reference each of these images in the site map with <image:image></image:image> tags. Within these tags, you will need to specify the URL of the image surrounded by <image:loc></image:loc> tags:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
      <loc>www.myfashionwebsite.com</loc>
 </url>
 <url>
      <loc>www.myfashionwebsite.com/shoes.html</loc>
       <image:image>
          <image:loc>
             http://www.myfashionwebsite.com/img/red-shoes.jpg
          </image:loc>
       </image:image>

       <image:image>
          <image:loc>
            http://www.myfashionwebsite.com/img/blue-shoes.jpg
          </image:loc>
       </image:image>

       <image:image>
          <image:loc>
             http://www.myfashionwebsite.com/img/green-shoes.jpg
          </image:loc>
       </image:image>
   </url>
</urlset>

Optional Tags for Image Sitemap

If you want to supply a caption for the image use:

<image:caption></image:caption>

If you want to supply a geographic location for the image use:

<image:geo_location></image:geo_location>

If you want to supply a title for the image use:

<image:title></image:title>

If you want to provide a URL to the license of the image use:

<image:license></image:license>