Images and Search Engine Optimization

If you own a website or a blog, it’s important that you do not overlook the importance of optimizing your images from an SEO perspective.

Too often when you can see a source code of a site that will read like this, <img src=”0003436.jpg”>.  If this is how your images are set up on your website then you are hindering the amount of potential traffic you receive. 

Your image will show up just fine on your site, but the problem is search engines like Google have no idea what the image is about.  The way to fix that is to add alt Tags.

To add alt tags, it’s simply a slight addition to the code listed above.  Code with alt tags will look like this, <img src=”0003436.jpg” alt=”Alt image description goes here”>.

Alt Tag Example

For an even more enhanced image, save the image file with descriptive keywords.  For the image on this page, I saved the file as Earth-From-Space.  This helps to give the image an even better description for the search engines to read.

The addition of alt tags and a good title for the image allows for the search engines to read the picture which will help with the relevancy of your page for its keywords and it will also help the image to be found in image searches.

On top of helping from an SEO perspective, alt tags also will help if an image is loading slowly or if a person has a disability.  If the image is now loading, your browser can display the alt text so that the viewer knows what the image is of.  For people with disabilities who cannot see or have difficulty reading, special text reading software can help to translate the image for the viewer.