Thursday, September 30, 2010

Don’t Forget About the Images

As important as it is to optimize your website’s written content, your website contains more than text. As such, it’s also vitally important to remember to optimize your images as well.

Search engines view Web pages as a series of text and code only; they do not “see” images like we do. When using images on your site, it is important to take time to optimize them so the search engines recognize and index them.

One extremely simple, yet amazingly effective, step is to give your image a relevant name, even using a keyword if possible. While it is crucial to not use a generic, meaningless name, such as ‘photo 1’, you must not stuff in too many keywords, either, as your craftiness will be recognized by the search engines. Just be sure the name you choose is relevant to the image and not overly long, and you should be fine. It’s also a good idea to replace any spaces in the title of your images with dashes.

HTML tags are another great feature that can be adjusted to increase your image SEO. By adding keywords into the tags for your title (the words that pop up when your mouse hovers over an image) and alt text (the text that is displayed when an image cannot be displayed), you’ll be strengthening your site for those phrases. As always, don’t be spammy about it - the search engines will catch on and it will be useless to any visually-impaired users who rely on those tags to experience your content.

Although these steps are very simple to carry out, they are massively effective and the necessary time should be taken to ensure that your images are optimized. You will be amazed by the results!

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