One of my clients has a great deal of images that they would like to display on their website. What’s the best way to search engine optimize their images for discovery on search engines?
Michael Cyger
[ Admin ]
Your website can gain a tremendous amount of exposure by leveraging your images, graphics and photos with SEO. There are many times that images help your customers understand your business or offerings more deeply. In addition, new search engines are being developed each year that focus only on images/graphics/photos — in some cases, they can help people shop by color, texture, etc. so having your images optimized for SEO can have big benefit.
Here are the two most important things to do:
- Use a filename that is descriptive of the image. Instead of titling your image of Mickey Mouse necklace as neck101a.jpg, you should title it mickey-mouse-necklace.jpg.
- Use an alternate text attribute for the image. The alternate text attribute was originally designed for vision impaired users of the web, but it’s become a great way to eek-out a little bit more SEO for your picture. Here’s what it looks like when you include a picture on your website:
<a href=“/images/mickey-mouse-necklace.jpg” alt=“Mickey Mouse necklace” />
Finally, a bonus item for SEO. Encourage others to use your pictures by providing information on how to do so legally. For example, if someone is a big Mickey Mouse fan, you can include text around your picture that allows them to copy and use your picture on their website if and only if they include a link back to your website to the exact page you specify. Not only do you get the credit for the picture, but you also get a link back to your website which helps you with your inbound links and PageRank.
(Note: I believe Disney owns the trademark to Mickey Mouse. Mickey was only used for illustrative purposes. Don’t go start a business making Mickey Mouse necklaces because I told you how to do SEO. :) )
