Image Content Team
Maya Ellison
Image SEO Specialist · Austin, Texas, USA
Makes sure the pictures on a site can actually be found — file names, alt text, image sitemaps and everything Google Images reads before it decides to show a photo.
Part of the Image Content team, led by Vanya Rose
About Maya
Maya works on the part of image content most people never see: the technical layer that tells a search engine what a picture is. A gallery can look perfect and still be invisible if every file is called IMG_4021 and every alt attribute is empty. Her job is to make sure that never happens on a site we manage.
She came to image SEO from e-commerce, where product photos either showed up in Google Images or the product did not sell. That habit of treating every image as something a visitor might search for directly has stayed with her.
Five years in, she audits new galleries before they publish and checks older ones when their image traffic starts to slip.
What she works on
- Descriptive file names and alt text
- Image sitemaps and structured data
- Google Images visibility checks
- Image size, format and page speed
- Pre-publish audits for new galleries
Background
How she got here
Education
Bachelor’s degree in Information Science, with coursework in metadata, search systems and digital archives.
Early work
Product image optimisation for online stores, where a missing alt tag meant a product nobody could find.
Into image-led sites
Moved to gallery and wallpaper sites, where images are not decoration but the whole reason people arrive.
Now
Image SEO for client sites at Infinity Linkers, working alongside the writers in the Image Content team.
Her team
Image Content team
Maya reports to Vanya Rose, Head of Image Content. The writers on the team — including Zoe Lane, Aiko Tanaka and Chloe Bennett — plan and write each gallery; Maya makes sure every image in it is ready to be found before it goes live.
Approach
Every picture is a search result
Maya treats each image as a page in its own right. If somebody found only that picture in Google Images, would the alt text describe it honestly, would the file name make sense, and would the page it sits on load quickly enough to keep them? If the answer to any of those is no, the image is not finished.
Outside work she photographs Texas architecture on film and keeps a spreadsheet of camera settings she has no intention of ever cleaning up.