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Image Search Engine Optimization: Images As SEO Tool by terranet

Images are powerful SEO tool which is often overlooked. Optimizing your website images for search engines is one of the most effective tactics of a website’s search engine optimization. Image search optimization helps to promote the website in search engines. The concept behind Image SEO is that search engines look at all content of a webpage, including the images.

With that in mind, let’s understand how search engines “see” the images and learn some basic image SEO principles.

ALT Image Text

Every image must have an ALT tag (Alternative Image Text).  Alternative Image Text is a small piece of text associated with the image and describing the content of the image. Alternative Image text appears when you move your mouse cursor over the image. Alt text also appears on-screen when the image is not available.

Image content should be relevant to the content of the web page. The thing is that search engine bots can’t see the image itself, but they can use the alt tag attribute to rank the image. Through Alt tags the search engines can find out the overall theme of the image and the relevancy of the image to the entire content of the web page. Therefore, the image content should be relevant to the text and content of the web page.

When search engine bots look at images, they can read Alternative Image Text (ALT tag), image file name, and the textual content which is around the image.

Use keywords in the image ALT attributes. Use keywords in the image files. Remember to separate keywords with dashes; avoid using underscores to separate keywords. For example, an image file named terranet-team.jpg is much better than terranet_team.jpg, or terranetteam.jpg.

Bad image naming structures may look as follows:
http://yourwebsite.com/portfolio/45.jpg
http://yourwebsite.com/portfolio/image25.jpg

Things to do when optimizing images for search engines:

• Use keywords in the image ALT tags
• Use meaningful “title” tag
• Alt text and file names should be meaningful, descriptive, and short
• Use keywords in the textual content around the image
• Make the image relevant to the web page content
• Do not separate words with underscores
• Pay attention to file extension and make the image gif, Jpeg or Png
• Avoid saving images in external locations
• Don’t save your images in root directory

Do not overlook the power of Image SEO. The combination of other SEO techniques with Image Optimization has proven to provide great results.

Image Search Engine Optimization can do more than just enhance your website’s overall SEO. Well organized, carefully named and properly presented images enhance the “image” of your website, making it look more professional and reliable.