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Optimizing Your Images For Search Engines

Posted on July 22, 2010 by Darrell Leinwand

Get Your Image In The SEO Picture

One thing has become increasingly important in SEO is image search, did you know that approximately 16% of web searches are for images? When you are working on your interactive marketing strategy, images should not be ignored.  This article will talk a bit aboutThe future of search how and why it’s growing, and strategies for optimizing your web site to receive this type of traffic.

Image Opitmization

When you are planning on adding images to your site, the first step is to figure out what kind of images you want to add.  Then, determine how and where you can obtain original images for your site. Image search engines don’t like duplicate content any more than web search engines, so you need to obtain your own original images. Once you have this in place, here are the major steps you can take to optimize for image search engines:
  • Use keywords in the alt tag attribute. This is a critical step, as it is the one best opportunities you have to unambiguously label the image. Note that the title tag attribute is usually ignored. Don’t waste your time on it.
  • Pick a logical file name that reinforces the keywords. Using hyphens in the file name to isolate the words in the keyword is an good strategy, just try not to exceed two hyphens, and do not use underscores as a word separator.
  • Use a descriptive file name, in a similar fashion to the alt tag attribute.
  • Pay attention to the file extension. For example, if the image search engine sees a “.jpg” (JPEG) file extension, it’s going to assume that the file is a photo.

Basic web page optimization applies too. For example:

  1. The title tag of the web page
  2. The text nearby the image
  3. The overall theme of the content of the page
  4. The overall theme of the site (or section of the site)
Also important is to get links to the page with the image on it. This could become an entire link building discussion in itself, but one simple way to do this it to post the pages with images on them to del.icio.us.