Many web designers and developers seem to overlook images as part of their sites optimisation. Most websites nowadays contain a large amount of images and few actually apply SEO techniques to them.
By not optimising your images you could be missing out on valuable traffic from Google Image Search, which has become one of Google’s most popular search systems. Here are 5 tips that can help you optimise your images correctly and gain traffic from searches being made for images.
Use Descriptive Image Names and Folder Names
If you’re saving your images using default names like 00229.gif the search engines wont be able to easily identify what your image may contain therefore it’s far better to use descriptive image names instead. For example if your site displays an image of a blue racing car the image name blue-racing-car.gif is far better.
Use Descriptive Alt Tags
Another great way of providing the search engines with clues about what’s your images contain is to use descriptive alt tags.
Without going over the top the more description that’s used within the alt tags the better. For example, instead of using ‘Golf GTA‘ as your alt tag, ‘This GOLF GTA one first prize at the car show‘ is better.
From past research it seems that Google Image Search prefers sentence-form descriptions and it probably down to the fact that text in sentence-form is likely to contain more descriptive keywords and helps the search engines to see you’re not trying to spam their systems but It’s still important not to stuff your alt tags with keywords unnecessarily.
Use Descriptive Anchor Text
If you’re going to be linking to your images using text again use descriptive text that describes what’s contained in the image.
Use Larger Images
There have been several reports published which suggest Google Image Search prefers larger images. While there is no concrete evidence for this it’s important to remember that SEO isn’t truly effective unless users click on your listings and someone searching for an image is more likely to click on a larger image that’s high in quality than a smaller low quality image.
Focus on the Page
As with all SEO, content is king. It’s not just about giving your images the right file names or using descriptive alt tags etc. Its also very important to make sure that the website pages your images display on are themselves well optimised and easily accessible by the search engines.
When your website pages themselves are well optimised the implementation of these image tips will be icing on the cake.
