SEO Your Images
Thanks to Jon for letting me post to his blog…I am much more responsible when I am held accountable to someone else. So when Jon asked me to be a guest blogger, I jumped at the opportunity…ok, last month I jumped at the opportunity. But I DID jump.
The purpose of this “guest blogging” by Tweeter: NotesFromKris. aka Kristina McInerny, is to impart my vast source of knowledge on website SEO. It’s actually just a ploy on Jon’s part to get free advice for his own website. It worked!
Let’s start small…
Let’s talk about images…
Search Engines (Google, Ask, MSN, Jeeves, etc) cannot “SEE” images; all they see is text. For images on your website, you need to be concerned with the following:
- file names
- alt property
- title property
Your filename needs to have hyphens between key words, no spaces, norunons (ha!), and it must consist of KEYWORDS. Keywords are a whole other discussion for advanced users. For this discussion and all future blogs, we will use an anti-gravity chair as our example product/marketing
An anti-gravity chair defies gravity. It is built for those who sit on their butts alot. It is comfy and ergonomic. We’ll assume that your optimized keywords are the following:
- anti-gravity
- comfortable chair
- floor vibration
- custom chairs
- comfort sitting
- sore back
- ergonomic chair
(Questions I asked myself in coming up with these: what problem are you trying to combat with this chair; what would people search for?)
So, before uploading your image, name it “comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg”.
IF you have control over your content and IF you know how to update your image properties, add the ‘ALT’ property to the “img” tag (or select image properties from your content management system; CMS). If you don’t have access to your website and don’t know how to update the source code, why are you reading this?
ALT stands for alternate; additional text that describes the photo, originally added for the browsers that didn’t display images or back ‘in the day’ when internet connectivity was slower than honey on a cold Northern day. Nowadays, internet is fast we don’t have to worry about turning off images. The ALT property is ADA compliant for the visually impaired.
So.. your html tag will look like this:
<img src=”/images/comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg” alt=”Black Anti-Gravity Chair to support your back and provide ergonomic support”>
Search engines can dig deeper into indexing your site with this.
The TITLE property is what displays when you mouse over an image…I believe there are some differences among browsers about which one (ALT or TITLE) appears on mouse-over. If the image is not available, ALT text will display, but if you don’t have a TITLE property, I believe that the ALT shows up upon mouse-over.
So.. your html tag will look like this:
<img src=”/images/comfortable-anti-gravity-custom-chair.jpg” alt=”Black Anti-Gravity Chair to support your back and provide ergonomic support” title=”Support a Healthy Back with the Anti-Gravity chair for ergonomic support.”>
Yes I like the word ergonomic.
Yes, your designer (assuming custom design) should be providing you with images that have seo-friendly file names. Yes, you should be paying them to do this extra bit of work. Yes, every little bit helps. Yes, the html provided to you should be optimized. Yes, you can do this later, but the earlier in the process you start this, the more likely:
- you will actually DO it
- it will be cheaper
Search Engine Optimization is a big puzzle. You can usually make out what a puzzle is going to look like with most of the pieces, but the more the pieces, the more clear the puzzle picture for the search engines.
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