Image SEO

Image SEO is very important, if you're not doing it, you're missing out on one more way to drive people to your web pages. It could be a 5% increase in traffic, could be 10% or could be 100%, you never know and it's all a bit of a gamble in the SEO business. Let's take a closer look at a few things that make or break a good images SEO.

ALT tags SEO

To put it shortly, if you want to do one type of SEO for images, this is it. Google and other search engines love ALT tags. It tells them (among other things) what the image is about. Search engines can't (up to a point) see what's on an image, so you have to tell them in some way what's on it.

If you don't know, ALT tag is property inside the IMG tag in HTML documents that you can write text into. Use it to write what your image is about. If you have a visual HTML editor, you can probably insert your description text under the ALT tag field in the interface. Here's an example on how to do it in pure HTML:

<img src="image.gif" alt="nice image showing buildings">

Many argue what is more important - ALT tags or image names (which I'll be writing about in just a few lines) and from my experience I'd go with ALT tags. I think they're probably more important than image names.

Image name SEO

Probably less important than having the correct and SEO ALT tags. To be on the safe side, if it's not too much work for you, use descriptive image names as well as ALT tags. It can do no harm, but I don't see it as a major mistake if you leave out this part.

More tips on image SEO

ALT tags SEO and image names SEO are far from everything to know if you want to know about images SEO. Your overall SEO for the page should be correct in order to give your image its deserved space in the search engine result pages. For example, if you have a whole page about dog food and then insert an image that is optimized for toys for boys keyword, I wouldn't bet you're doing the right thing.

How to choose the ALT tag text and image names? That question isn't in the scope of this article, it's a general SEO question. You choose those things mostly in the same way as choosing any other text for the rest of your web page. Perhaps the pointer that I find the most helpful is to write text that you know people type in search engines when they're looking for what you're writing about. There, I said it all ;-)

Good luck with image SEO!