Helping image packs: image sitemap vs on-page signals

Helping image packs: image sitemap vs on-page signals

Today's lesson: an image sitemap — a special list of your pictures' web addresses given to Google — helps photos get found. But it's only half the job.

Picture mailing a guest list versus actually decorating the room.

1. The image sitemap is the guest list: it tells Google which images exist and where, useful when images load via scripts Google might miss.
2. On-page signals — filename, alt text, caption, nearby words — are the decorations that decide if an image actually ranks.
3. A sitemap gets images discovered; on-page context gets them chosen for the pack.

The tradeoff: don't rely on the sitemap alone (discovery without ranking) or skip it when images load lazily (ranking signals Google never sees).

Try this: check if your images appear normally in 'view source'. If they're hidden behind scripts, an image sitemap helps. 🎓