Why It Is Important To Optimize Images For Search Engines & How To Do It ?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of any website. Although Google, along with the other search engines most people do not care about, claims a website should be created with only the user in mind, it is downright impossible to have a website that ranks without some SEO. However great a website may be, it is safe to assume that it will not be very popular unless you actually take some time to implement a few SEO techniques. One of these techniques involves optimizing the website's images for search engines. While many webmasters may disregard this, it is actually extremely important to optimize such image properly as they play a direct role in a website's rankings.
The first thing to take into consideration is the image name. Unfortunately, as people try to be more efficient when developing websites, many frameworks and platforms have automatic renaming modules that will randomly generate image names that will merely consist of a string of numbers and characters. These are often a missed opportunity, as an image named 124324124.jpg serves absolutely no purpose on showing its relevancy. As such, you must ensure that all your important images have proper names. As an example, if for example your website deals with the Sud Sauvage tourist attraction in Reunion island, you could name your logo sud-sauvage.jpg instead of the absolutely generic logo.jpg.
However, it is also important that you do not simply overload your image names in keywords as you then run of risk of being penalized by search engines. While most off-site techniques cannot really penalize your websites, just one attempt at trying to game search engines using on-site techniques will cause your site to be completely invisible. Using the example above, while sud-sauvage.jpg is an ideal name since it is concise and relevant to the website's content, anything that contains more than four words is bound to raise a flag. Moreover, when you are naming your images, make sure to use a name that is actually relevant to the image itself. Anything else could be frowned upon by search engines, and by always being relevant, you also show that you are using these mainly for the benefit of your users.
Another factor to take into consideration regarding names is which character to use between distinct words. Simply sticking the words together should be avoided at all costs since it creates a mess and will often throw away any attempt at relevancy. Two common characters used as separators are the hyphen (-) and the underscore (_). Although both may at first seem to accomplish the purpose, it is usually a better idea to use the hyphen since this is more natural to humans and there is some understanding that Google likes hyphens more than underscores.
The final step to take into consideration as your optimize your image for search engine is the ALT attribute. Originally, the ALT attribute was used to provide an alternative text for images that could not load. They have since move on to provide a short description of an image for search engines since the latter are unable to understand what an image is about otherwise. Consequently, you should always use the ALT attribute to provide a short but relevant description of important images present on your website. What you should however avoid is always using the same text in several such attributes and to try to include a long list of keywords for just one image. The sensible approach is to use a very small description that does not exceed five words and that actually appropriately describes the content of that particular image. When choosing your ALT contents, make sure you correctly capitalize your text as text that is completely in lower case is often unreadable and may come across as a spam attempt to search engines.
Ashvin Sawmynaden is a blogger who blogs on several topics including internet marketing and travel. He regularly contributes to the Sud Sauvage blog and is also a huge Maurice hotel travel enthusiast.
May 17th, 2011 - 10:09
Thanks for the timely posting on using images as part of SEO. I’ve been wrestling with this particular topic of late and am glad to have the clarification you provided. Makes much more sense to me know.
July 10th, 2011 - 04:26
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