Many of you use various images to express your writing better to your website visitors. Images are very cool to look at and in most cases images help to to make your site look very professional. For example, let’s look at the Commonwealth Bank homepage.
Notice on the top of their home page they have this banner of a child which says - “every day’s a new day”. Now of course this single image beside their yellow navigation buttons makes their site more ‘presentable’ and ‘alive’. However you need to understand that the search engines don’t see or read web pages like the way we humans do.
Its very easy for a human reader to interpret the image into its meaning. However for a Web crawler the whole interpreting process is completely different. Search Engine Spiders can read text from your website line by line, just like the way you see it when you view the source of your page in a web browser. But for images/videos and advanced objects like javascript & flash, web crawlers usually just skips those lines and moves to the next line. Thus if your website has extensive amount of images and less content, a web crawler might find no indexable content in your site that they would want to add into their web index.
But don’t worry too much. There are certain ways by which you can optimize images for search engine. Once you do proper Image Optimization, your images will be more ‘readable’ by the web crawler and the images will be also listed in the Image Search Engines like - Google Images.
How to Optimize Images for Search Engine
Image optimization is one of those things that falls under the ‘best practices’ heading for Webmasters. Simply put Image Optimization as de facto benefit, if you are truly planning to run your site in the right manner.
Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:
- A
srcattribute specifying the URL of the image - A
widthdeclaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels - A
heightdeclaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels - An
altattribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO - A
titleattribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image
The width and hight of the picture is not compulsory if you have already resized your image according to your requirement. In wordpress or in any other popular CMS, You can actually select an image and resize it in design view by using the resize handles which are located at four corners of the image. So when you use the resize handles to resize an image the cms will automatically put the width and height attribute for you in your image code.
Image Optimization Explained: How to get more traffic from Google Image Search
• Alt text — ALT text or Alternate Text, is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but remember to keep it short. You should use search keywords for ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt tag is used in place of that particular image. Here is sample image code with ALT text:
## < img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description”> ##
• File name — always use meaningful file name to your images, use image file name like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “pic123.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to ALT text. Also, try to keep the path to your image theme such as:
images/phones/apple-iphone-covers.jpg
• Image Title — always use the title tag in images which will show the title as tooltip when a user moves his mouse over the image. Example of an image with title tag:
## < img src=”http://imagelocation.jpg” alt=”Image description” title=”Title of the Image”> ##
• Surrounding Text — always place a paragraph of descriptive text directly above and below your image, with the keywords from your ALT text and Image Name
• Page Title — Include your keywords in your Page Title and Meta Description. It helps Google define the theme for the page which helps in Image Searches and Google Search Index.
• Page Theme — Keep the theme of each page. Do not mix the content with other topics.
• Links — Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “Picture of Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view picture”. The link text tells Googlebot that it is a link to a picture of Apple iPhone.
Thats pretty much it. If you can follow this properly, I am sure you will get heeps of traffic from Google Image Search (Especially if you have a shopping/celebrity or any site that has a lot of images). Its also good for SEO purpose, because now you are letting the Search Engine know about all the images of your site.