Images And Search Engine Optimization

Images and SEO is one of those posts that I have been thinking of sharing with you for a while now but didn't. Why? Because I thought the value of Images and optimizing your images for the search engines is very much in the 'well known' folder

But looking at some websites and some of the questions on the forums and which I am asked personally, perhaps This article on SEO and images needs to be written

The bottom line is the images on your websites should be independently getting traffic for you, search engine traffic.
Google images is a search engine that is often used by a lot of people when they want to see an image. And when I think of it, Google images is something I use on a daily basis, not related to my internet marketing business

So what you want is for your images to rank well in Google images for keywords relevant to your site and obviously relevant to your images.

So how do you get your images to rank well in the images search engine

File Name. I the old days it was okay to name our images image 1, image2, image3, .... and that's okay. but won't do you much good if you are trying to rank for 'search engine optimization'. So give the images names that contain your keyword or a variation on the theme

Alt Tag. When you add an image to a webpage, you have the option of adding an alt tag to it. The initial purpose of alt tag was so that you have a descriptive text of the image if viewing the site on a browser that cannot load images.

But the alt tag is words on your page. Words that can be read by the search engine bot and can therefore contribute to the keyword density of the page the image is on. So include your keyword in your alt tag. Make it short and to the point. Try not to be too spammy with it or the search engines could red flag you. Not a good thing

Words next to the image. The words around your image are relevant, especially the words immediately after the image. SO if you want one f your images to come up high in the Google image search engine for a particular keyword, have those words appear in the sentence immediately after the image

Okay so I have given you a few tips on how to optimize your images for the search engines

A gentle warning. DO NOT ABUSE THE ALT TAG. Having the same alt tag for all the images on your page, or worse still repeating your keyword in one alt tag over and over again could get you a penalty with Google

So use these tips but be sensible about optimizing your images for the search engines