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If you sell a product, or just have quite a lot of images on your website, did you know that you can optimize them for the search engines?
Most search engines (e.g Google, Yahoo), now have specific image searches which allow visitors to search for images relating to their keywords, and this is a great way of bringing additional traffic to your website.
So how do you go about optimizing your images for the search engines so that they appear in the search results, whether it be within a specific image search or included in the main search results?
1. Give your image a descriptive file name, so if it’s an image of a red t-shirt, then ‘red-tshirt.jpg’ is your best bet rather than ‘image1.jpg’ or a random file name.
2. Give your image a proper ‘alt’ tag on your website, which is a label for your image which shows up when you hover over it with your mouse. Not only will this help with optimization but is also necessary for good website usability & accessibility.
3. Optimise your web page to include the same keywords as used for your image, so if your page is about the red t-shirt, then this will be much easier. Also ensure that there aren’t too many other images on the page. Therefore if you’re optimizing images on an e-commerce site, then it will be much easier to optimize the specific product page containing the image.
For more tips on image optimisation, Search Engine Land has a particularly good illustration.
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
