Optimizing Images for the Search Engines

by Editor on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 | No Comments

Search engines are integrating more elements into their search results in an attempt to provide a better user experience. These changes provide both a challenge and an opportunity to optimize web pages for higher search ranking. Improving your image seo is one such opportunity.

Many websites use image code that is missing the information that will let the search engines find the images or video, and potentially rank them in the search results. The benefit of gaining additional traffic is well worth the effort to optimize your pages.

Here is a List of Image SEO Tips:

Name image files and alt tags appropriately for improved seo relevance. Also, try to use absolute link references, and include image size data
JPG files are preferred because search engines may interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image, and JPGs as photos
Make image files accessible to the search engines and don’t use limitations such as, robots exclusion or javascript to view a larger image
Linking an image to a larger version of the image using the same type of seo format may provide an additional boost
Optimize the test in the RSS feed just like web pages with keyword rich text in the titles and descriptions
Use relevant keyword tags such as, captions, cross-grouping, location, and themes
Optimize the content that surrounds the images or video using related keywords that describe what it is
Improve the chances of your videos being crawled by the search engines by creating and submitting a video sitemap in your Goggle webmaster account
Use the words “picture”, “image”, or “video” in the alt tags and captions. Many searches include a keyword plus one of these words
Enable the enhanced image search feature in your Google webmaster account. Images and videos a growing part of universal search results, and helping the search engines find yours can help your seo efforts.