Majority of the SEOers I have seen are overly obsessed with getting rankings in Google (and also MSN and Yahoo) web search listings only. In doing so they are overlooking a very low hanging SEO fruit – image optimisation.
Image optimisation is the process of tweaking your image elements to get high visibility in image search – in any of the three major search engines. Done correctly, it can increase traffic to your site substantially.
So, how do you go about optimizing your images?
Let me explain the steps with an example.
Say, you have a Paris Hilton image in Swimwear that you want to optimize so that the image ranks for a range of keywords like ‘Paris Hilton Swimsuit’, ‘Paris Hilton Swimwear’, ‘Paris Hilton in Swimsuit’ and ‘Paris Hilton in Swimwear’ etc.
Step 1: Use Alt attribute
Insert relevant keyword(s) in ALT attribute of your image. You might like to put the ALT value as alt=”Paris Hilton in Swimsuit”.
Step 2: Use Title attribute
Insert relevant keyword (s) in Title attribute of your image. Going with the above example, you might want to put the Title value as title = “Paris Hilton in Swimwear”.
Step 3: Use Image Caption
Below I present the simplest form of HTML coding to create caption for an image. You can tweak it to include divisions etc.
<table>
<tr><td><img …></td></tr>
<tr><td class=”caption”>Paris Hilton in Swimwear</td></tr>
</table>
Notice that I am using keyword(s) for the image caption.
Step 4: Use keyword-image proximity
Put the image close to text about ‘Paris Hilton’. Ideally the image should be situated on the left or right side of text block . Sprinkle the text with your core keywords ‘Swimsuit’, ‘Swimwear; ‘Paris Hilton’, ‘Paris Hilton Swimsuit’ and also thematically similar keywords like ‘Bathing Suit’, ‘Bikini’ , ‘Paris Hilton in Bikini’ etc. (note: you can find out what words Google places in the same “theme” by using the tilde ~ command in Google. For example using ~ before ‘swimsuit’ in Google will show you that ‘bikini’ is related to ‘swimsuit’)
Step 5: Use keyword in Image Filename
Most of the time I see non-descriptive image filenames like 123.jpg, upload-image1.gif etc. Dump this trend and use descriptive filenames for your image files. Paris-hilton-swimsuit.jpg, paris-hilton-swimwear.gif, paris-hilton-bikini.jpg etc. are some good examples of optimised image filenames.
What next –
Get a few links from other sites to your image file with keyword(s) in anchor text. Going with the above example of Paris Hilton, a few good anchor text that you can use are ‘Paris Hilton in Swimsuit’,’ Paris Hilton in Swimwear’, ‘Paris Hilton in Bikini’, ‘Paris Hilton in Bathing Suit’ etc. (note: it is important to get variations in anchor text, else backlinks for you image may generate a Spammy anchor text pattern which may not be liked by the search engines).
A word of caution –
The steps I have outlined above will surely bring more traffic to the site from image searches. But do not overdo the optimisation process. Do not stuff unnecessary keywords in image attributes. Doing so can easily lead to over-optimization and your webpage might get penalized by the search engines.
Related posts:
