Image via CrunchBase

If you want to have the search indexes of all the major search engines rank the images of your website, you need to create an image sitemap. In order to get the search engines to do this, the image sitemap feed is the most important step. These sitemaps are created to compel search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to provide the results of your choice.

For instance, Image Sitemaps allow Google to understand the metadata regarding the image content on your particular website. The creation of an image sitemap involves a Wordpress plugin or custom code for your content management system. In order to start, you just install the plugin or the custom code which creates a file following the standard image sitemap xml format.

The sitemaps are usually in either XML format or a compressed XML format. With XML format, you can receive image sitemap feeds as it produces a report regarding errors and encountered threats. Also, other statistical analysis can also be viewed. XML sitemaps are also supported fully by Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live Search etc.

In order to submit the image sitemaps to the search engines, the file must be in the root of the homepage. The submission can be processed through any of these three ways.

Register at the search engine's website.

Submit though a ping request.

By listing the XML file in the Robots.txt file

All these ways can lead to your website images being indexed by the search engines. If you desire to receive the best results, the sitemap must be submitted to Google. You can be assisted by the Google image sitemap feed tutorial linked previously in this article.