Images are often overlooked as a factor for Search Engine Optimization performance, but the truth is that they are an essential part of a key SEO structure. The good news is that optimizing images is really a simple process although it does include a handful of steps.
First, Why Optimize Images?
Image searching is growing everyday, and more than ever, users are demanding to see visuals to get an idea of products, services, and places. Images can provide a nice stream of traffic, and can even be thought of as a separate stream of traffic to any page, in addition to already SEO optimized text.
Use Tags with Appropriate Keywords
- Title Tags – These tags will display when a user places their mouse pointer over the image. Title tags are also read by search engine spiders so it is important to include your main keywords in the title tag.
- ALT Tags – The ALT tag provides a text description of the image to users which have disabled images or cannot view the image. Although these tags have been depreciated by Google and other major search engines, they still provide some SEO value.
Custom Image File Name
If you’re used to working with stock photos, then you’ve probably seen some crazy file names, like “s3849248493033.jpg“. However, this is a big “no-no” for web images. All images on your site should have a proper file name that briefly describes the image using keywords. So if you are trying to optimize an image on college, you would want to name it something like “college-life.jpg“. Tip: Separate words with a “-“.
Be Natural & Unique
Don’t “keyword stuff” or use excessively long descriptions. Your ALT tags, title tags, and file names must appear natural to users while also being brief and to the point. In fact, Google says, “don’t overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don’t stuff it with extra keywords“. Search engines may penalize your site for “keyword stuffing”.
Don’t Use Large Images
Images that are a reasonable size are better favored by search engines. Whenever you can help it, do not use excessively large images.
Related Surrounding Text
Until search engine robots can develop receptors to see images, they must rely on the above factors. along with an image’s surrounding text to guess a picture’s actual image. Therefore, an image’s immediate surrounding text (before and after) should be relevant to the graphic’s actual image.
Use Height & Width Tags
As I’ve mentioned in previous articles like optimizing page loading time, including height and width tags for your images immediately makes your site load faster and also increases the search engine friendliness of your page. It is a good practice to always include height and width tags.
And the final project…an Optimized Image
This is the code of the optimized image I have included as a thumbnail, as shown in the top-left corner of this page.
<img title="Search Engine Image Optimization" src="http://www.marketingwiseguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/seo-image-optimization.jpg" alt="SEO Optimizing for Images" width="120" height="90" />
Don’t be lazy and optimize your images! Share your image optimization tips and experience below.
I dont know but I dont get any visitor from Google images
Wow, these are pretty detailed tips. I didn’t realize images could be optimized so much for SEO. Now I’m going to look through my pages and see if I can tweak my images. Thnks!