Everyone knows that SEO, or search engine optimization is important for the content on their site. That’s fairly common knowledge at this point. What a lot of people don’t realize is that your images can bring you a great deal of search traffic too. People are constantly searching for images for many different reasons, and if you can optimize your images to take advantage of those searches, you can bring more traffic to your site.
The first thing you should do is be sure that your images are all named correctly. Give your images names that reflect what is pictured in the image. For example, the picture above of the JPEG icon is named “jpeg icon.png”. If you are using a photograph, make sure the image name describes what’s going on in the picture. For example, a photograph of two guys playing with a Frisbee should have a name along the lines of “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg” Don’t be afraid to have a long image name. It’s more important that the image name be descriptive than short. Try to include spaces between the words in the image name. If your content management won’t support spaces, put dashes instead. It’s important that the words be separated so that search engines can easily recognize them.
You should also take the time to fill out the alt tags for your images. whenever you mouse over an image, you will see some text displayed. That text is dictated by what is written in the alt tag for an image. Again, be descriptive in your alt tags. Include a little more detail in the alt tags than you did in the image name. In the example above the image name was “two guys playing Frisbee in a park.jpg”. In this example you might want your alt tags to contain the text “two guys playing Frisbee in a park on a bright summer day” That way, there is more text relevant to the contents of the image associated with it.
Remember, search engines can’t see your images. They’re relying on you to describe the images in a way that they can understand. Giving your images strong names, and including relevant information in your alt tags makes it easy for search engines to understand what is going on in your pictures so that they can do a better job of placing them in search results. By taking the time to optimize your images for search, you are ensuring better search traffic to your site over time.
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