Optimize your use of images

There is this thing called Google image search. Guess what? Lots of people use it. Do you want people that use Google image search to find you?

The question above sounds rhetorical. And for most people it probably is. But there is the occasional person out there where images search isn’t really that important. Imagine that you’ve got a law firm. Would you want people to that are searching for images of lawyers to find you? My guess is that you probably don’t care that much about this sort of traffic. I personally don’t find much value from people that come to our website looking for “SEO images”. Most of these people are just trying to rip off free SEO related images to use for their own website. Having these sort of people visit our site isn’t really benefitial.

But, there are probably many of you reading that have a shopping cart that sells things. Imagine you’re selling “mens suits”. In this case, you would probably want to show up for people looking for pictures of mens suits.

Images are a straightforward component of your site. As such, optimization is relatively easy. Make sure that you use an tag for each image. The tag tells Google what your images is about. If you don’t us it, how is Google going to know what the image is about? Google is clever, but they’re not that clever. The "alt" attribute also allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.

There might be a few of you out there that really want your image to show up in Google searches. If that is you, then you can create 100’s or 1,000’s or back-links to your image. Procure the back-links in the usual way (article posting, press release submission, etc). Just link to the exact image, and for goodness sakes, make sure to use a descriptive anchor text. Without an anchor text, your links will be almost useless.

Good practices for images

  1. Use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text- Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text (for ASCII languages) are best when they're short, but descriptive.
  2. When you choose file names, separate words with dashes. “Mens-suit.jpg” is much better then “mensSuit.jpg
Avoid:
   
  a. writing extremely lengthy filenames. This will also prevent you from keyword stuffing (another no-no).
  b. using generic filenames like "image1.jpg", "pic.gif", "1.jpg" when possible (some sites with thousands of images might consider automating the naming of images).
  3. Supply alt text when using images as links- We don’t really suggest that you use images as links. However, sometimes it really does make good design sense. In this case, filling out an images alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing anchor text for a text link.
Avoid:
   
  a. See our article on anchor text. The same ideas apply here. (Duplicate content is never good, and internal linking is good SEO.) 


 

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