Optimize Your Images for Search: Some Tips To Optimize Your Images For Search
Posted Under: Search Engine Optimization
Here are some simple steps you can take to optimize your images for search, ensure that your images are search engine ready and ultimately improve the rankings of your images with the search engines.
- Provide A Descriptive File Name
Image file names provide very specific information to both your visitors and the search engines about the topic of your image.
The keywords you use in the file name of your image should be more specific than DSCN6418 or img34.jpg.
A more descriptive file name such as Siamese_Cat.jpg, SpottedSeaTrout.jpg or Albino_Loggerhead_Turtle.gif is preferable and more useful to your users..
- Provide A Descriptive Caption
Whenever possible try to provide a descriptive text caption to more fully describe your images.
A descriptive caption will help the search engines associate your image with the keywords you used in the text content surrounding the image.
- Link Your Images For Higher Page Ranking
You can improve your PR and assist the search engine spiders crawl your page content by linking to your image from other pages or to the page that the image is imbedded on.
Linking pages with a higher PR to your image will ultimately result in improving your PR.
- Using Descriptive Alt Text
There are many situations where an image will not be shown in a browser, such as when a visually impaired person must use a screen reader of when people must use low bandwidth Internet connections.
In these situations you can help the search engines improve usability by adding descriptive alt text content to the image alt attribute.
This helps the search engines determine the best image to retrieve for a user’s specific search query.
SEO your alt text by using descriptive keywords in the alt text but DO NOT add a long string of keywords.
All this does is flag your image to the search engines as a potential spam site and dilute the usefulness of the alt text.
Keyword stuffing is always a definite NO NO.
- Provide Focused Keywords
If you are writing about Tarpon fishing in the Florida Keys and are using an image of an angler battling a tarpon, your keywords should be focused on exactly what the image depicts.
Focused keywords like “Tarpon Fishing in Key West, Florida” is preferable to “Florida Saltwater Fishing”.
- Adding Image Specific Tags To Your Sitemap
If you are having problems getting your images indexed by Google, you can always add image specific tags to your sitemap.
Specific image tags tell Google which images are more important to you on your site.
If you don’t already have a sitemap, you can create one manually or use one of the many third-party tools that are available online to help you generate your sitemap.
You can add your image information to an existing Sitemap or create a separate image Sitemap to list your images.
Both methods work equally well.
If you don’t already have a Sitemap for your website, create one now.
As you can see it really doesn’t take a great deal of extra effort to optimize your images for search so why not do it?