Most sites on the web rely heavily on images to give the page a more visually appealing look or to explain something to the site’s visitor. Examples of the latter can be a photo of the owner of the site or some kind of map that can explain something to the visitor more easily than when using text.
Search engines, at the moment, can’t “read” images. The phrase “An image is worth a thousand words” is not true in SEO-land.
One of the most commonly known Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips that go around has to do with the way you name and tag the images that you use on your site. Its fairly commonly accepted by most SEO experts that Google not only looks at the text on your blog in order to measure its worth but that Google’s spidering bots also take a look at the code you use in your image files.
Over the years SEO techniques have been developed to abuse this fact and webmasters have ’stuffed’ their ‘alt tags’ with all kinds of keywords – however Google has found ways to combat this and treats such strategies as spamming their bots now – however it is still legitimate to put keywords in you image tags and I would recommend that you do (within reason).
I’m not going to tell you to stop using images on your sites. Use them where needed, but keep in mind the consequences of using those images. They essentially hide content that is available for your users from search engines.
The easiest way to overcome this problem is to use the alt-attribute of your image. If the image is about your labrador dog, make the alt text “labrador dog”. This will also help search engines find your image when people are doing an image search.
If the image is also a link, don’t make the alt text “link to my labrador dog”, The tag will have made that clear.
Using alt tags this way also helps vision-impaired people. Just like search engines, they can’t see the page, so they have to rely on the text that’s on your page. For many sites, it wouldn’t hurt to think more about this.
Hope you like those Search Engine Optimization tips and it can benefit your seo services.