When it comes to ranking with SEO, don’t focus entirely on textual content. Many people overlook the power of images and graphics for their attention grabbing and link grabbing abilities. However, with the proper use of image tags and descriptions you can easily take advantage of Google’s ranking system and help bump your site even higher in rank results.
Here are a few steps to follow to ensure that you are getting the most out of your images.
1. Describe your image
Always use the alt attribute when you include an image on your site. Create a short and sweet description of your image and keep in mind the keywords you are targeting. Another thing to consider is that these descriptions are read by search engines and translated to speech readers for the visually impaired. Therefore, this not only helps improve your search results, but also extends your audience.
2. Don’t embed text into your images
Yes, this looks fancy and having pretty text is fun, but try to avoid it. Search engines don’t recognize this text, so it won’t help you. However, if you can’t overcome the urge, be sure to insert alt text and consider using a text description next to your image.
3. Name your files
If you’re in a hurry it’s easy to save an image as IMG1.jpg. Don’t do this. If you are working with a lot of images at once it can be tedious to name each one individually, but taking the time to do this will help out in the long run. Try to include the page title, page content and alt tag into the file name. If someone searches for “all natural weight loss pills”, you are more likely to show up as a result with an image titled ‘all natural RezV supplement’ than you are with ‘IMG1234.jp’.
4. Take advantage of image sharing sites
Upload your images on sites like Flickr, Wikipedia or Picassa and then link them back to your site. The more places your images can be found, the better.
5. Link back to previous posts
If an image or the content related to the image relates to a previous post, link back to it. This follows the same basic idea of linking keywords or phrases to previous posts.
