Google spiders, unlike video content can very easily search the images and graphics inserted in your web pages. However, if any page on your website is having many images then the spiders may have problem in identifying which out of those is the most relevant one for the content on that page. Therefore, it is recommended that publishers must include image sitemap on their websites. This will not just give Google crawlers a good hint about many images that must be included in image search results but will also assist them in identifying the most vital images on that specific page.

Generating image sitemaps:

If you have a WordPress website then you can make use of the XML sitemaps plug-in to generate image sitemap automatically with just a click. Once you have generated the image sitemap you can then add it to your webmaster tools to inform crawlers about your new sitemap and can use robots.txt file to help them in identifying the images easily.

In case you do not have a WordPress site then your site images get hosted on Amazon S3 or any other domain which is different from the blog domain then you may have to prove the ownership of the host for which you submit the URL on a sitemap. This can be easily done by adding the hosting domain to the webmaster tools account.

The XML sitemap for images makes use of the sitemaps.org protocol but is presently not supported by Yahoo, Bing various other search engines.