Alt Tags and Other Image Optimization Tools
Published July 11, 2010 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
Having an attractive site is important for making a good first impression on your visitors. This is why it’s crucial that you use great looking images to accompany your site copy and to communicate the overall “personality” of your company. However, it’s also important that you optimize your images for indexing by the search engines and optimize them so that they will load quickly. This article will provide you with specific instructions on how to optimize your site images using Alt tags and other tools.

How Your Images “Look” to the Search Engines

Search engines send out automated programs called “spiders” that crawl your site and search for what type of content it contains. Although spiders aren’t able to “see” images, they are able to read the text which is associated with those images. With this information, and the information gathered from your content and your meta data, the search engines determine the theme of your site. There are three types of text that the search engine spiders “see” when they look at your images:

  • Image Alt tags: accessible (by means of programs which dictate text) also to web users who are vision impaired.
  • Image file name: this is the actual name of your image file. For example: “ocean landscape.jpeg”
  • Image captions: the text which is found directly beside, over, or underneath your images.
Optimizing each of these types of text enhances the SEO of your site and  assists you in further communicating your site’s theme to the search engines.

How to Optimize Your Website Images

       1.       Optimize Your Alt Tags
 
Every time you put a new image into your site, you’ll be asked to input what’s called an “alt tag” to describe the image. Below is an example of what your image alt tag will look like in your HTML code:

<img src="filename.jpeg" alt="image alt description">
 
The place where it says image alt description above is where you’ll want to use the keywords which you’re optimizing that specific page for. For example, if your page is being optimized for the primary keyword “healthy weight loss plan” and you have a before and after image of someone, your alt tag might look like this:

<img src="healthy weight loss plan-before and after.jpeg" alt="healthy weight loss plan-woman before and after">

Notice here that the primary keywords are used in the beginning of the alt tag, but that the image description is also included to make sure that vision impaired visitors here an accurate description.  

       2.       Your Image File Names
 
When you create and save the images for your site, it’s a good idea to use your keywords in the image file name as well. For example, let’s look at HTML code for the image for “healthy weight loss before and after” again:

<img src="healthy weight loss plan-before and after.jpeg" alt="healthy weight loss plan-woman before and after">

Notice here that the image file name includes the keywords just as the image alt tag includes the keywords. Just be sure that you still have a way to distinguish the images on your site from one another.

  1. Image Captions
As an additional measure of optimizing your images, use you keywords in the captions above or below your images as well. For example, if you have an image of a before and after shot (as in the examples above), you might use the following caption:

“Jane says the healthy weight loss plan helped her go from a size 14 to a size 6!”

As always, just be sure that the use of your keyword within your captions looks natural and that it adds value to the visitors who are viewing the site.

  1. Optimizing Links to Your Images
If you have any links (either on your site or off) which are leading to your images, be sure to use the keywords within the anchor text of that link. For example, if you’re linking back the image in the above examples, your html code for the link might look like this:

<a href=“http://www.yoursite/images/healthy weight loss plan-before and after.jpeg”>results of a healthy weight loss plan</a>

In this example, the words “results of a healthy weight loss plan” would appear as a hyper link that visitors could click and to find the “healthy weight loss plan-before and after.jpeg” image.

Check Your Images with Google Images

As a final step, you can check to see if your images have been indexed in Google images. To do this, just go to Google images and type “site:yoursite.com” into the search bar. For example, if your site name is http://www.mysite.com, you type “site:mysite.com” into the image search bar. Once you do this, you’ll see a page displaying the images on your site as they have been indexed by Google images.
 
Conclusion

Optimizing your images can do more than just increase the SEO of your site, it will also help you get traffic from Google images. If you feel that the image data on your site needs to be optimized according to the guidelines in this article and don’t have the time to do it yourself, you can always hire the job out.  This is a job which can be completed in about one hour’s time for every ten pages of your site which include images.

Royalty Free Image Websites

Stock.xchng
 
Free Stock Photos
 
Free Digital Photos.net
 

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