Image Search and Priorities

Many websites use images – how and when and where and why you use them can make all the difference in your site’s SEO.

How high a priority is SEOing your images? It should be fairly high on your to-do list, as images can be very valuable places to get some keywords in and get some attention especially in the image search engines!

The first step to image optimization is to figure out how images play a part in your site and how you can obtain images with direct relevance to your content- not just to look pretty.

If you can take pictures yourself, they will have the advantage of being completely original and you know how search engines love original content! Images are content – remember that and beat into your head! You just have to make them visible to the search engines, and the way to do that is by tagging.

First, you need to use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is your best opportunity to purposefully label the image. If your image can help your site by being a geographical marker, include your location information in the alt tag attribute.

The title tag attribute is not as important, but leave no stone unturned! Anything can change at any time, and optimizing across the board makes your site ready for anything.

A file name that hammers home your keywords is the next step. You can use hyphens in the file name to separate the words in the keyword but try not to exceed two hyphens and don’t use underscores – it’s tacky looking. Use a descriptive file name, just like you did in your alt tag attribute.

You must also give a moment’s thought to the file extension. If the image search engine sees a “.jpg” (JPEG) file extension, it’s going to assume that the file is a photo. Make sure you are representing the file properly.

Don’t forget basic web page optimization: the title tag of the web page, the text surrounding the image, the overall theme and content of the page and the site or sector of the site must all be taken into account.

You also need to get links to the page with the image on it; one way is by posting images to sharing sites such as del.icio.us. If you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, use robots.txt to block the crawler from indexing all of them – just have the thumbnail or the full size image indexed.

One last word: make sure you protect yourself by warning off image stealers: place some text in the image, such as “photo by …” of “image by …”. This requires a potential thief to do some editing to the image before they can use it, and makes your site a hassle to steal from