Image Optimization for your Site

You may think that search engine optimization is all about keywords, but it’s really not. It’s also about good content, back links, and now, image optimization. People search for images all the time on Google and other search engines, so you might as well get in on the act. You can optimize your site for images even if images aren’t one of your products. And besides, people like websites to have pictures. A huge page of unbroken text is intimidating.

Once you optimize your website for images, your site will appear in image search results and pick up new visitors and potential customers. Optimizing your site for images isn’t instantaneous and will require some time and effort, but it’s worth it. Here are some ways to do it.

Ask yourself, “How can we use images on our website?” What kind of images “go” with your website? You want your traffic to be targeted, so you have to put some thought into it. That means that unless you’re in the bikini business, pictures of women in bikinis may get you traffic, but there would only be a random chance that any of those visits would result in sales.

Once you have an idea, you have to get an image that you can use legally. There are several ways to do this. You can create them yourself if you’re a decent photographer who is reasonably well-versed in PhotoShop. If you do this, you need to add a watermark or some other indication that the rights to the picture belong to you. Image theft happens all the time, and you certainly don’t want your picture selling your competitor’s product.

Another way to get an image for your website is to hire a freelancer to do it. You can also find large databases of free images on the web, and of course, you can buy them from a stock photography site.

Once you have an image or images, you can optimize them for image search. Start by dealing with the alt tags. When you hover your mouse over an image, the text you see is the alt tag, and it increases keyword density in the eyes of the search bots. They help the engine crawlers determine the relevance of the image. Additionally, the alt tag is what will show when users have the pictures disabled in their browser. Use your targeted keywords in your alt tags, but you don’t have to waste them on words like picture, image, etc. because they’re usually already attributed to the search query.

If you are able, include the file name with your keywords, as long as they make sense. It is better to use hyphens rather than underscores to separate words. You should also avoid duplicating images. Say you have the same image, only in several sizes: you don’t want all of them to get indexed. What you can do is deny search robots access to the ones you don’t want indexed.

Finally, build links to the pages where the images are. One good way to do that is to submit your page to a social bookmarking site like Digg. All the extra back links you get will eventually add up to a healthy search engine ranking.