SEO for Images.
Search engine optimisation is becoming increasingly important for web images and image search.
Apart from optimising website content, it has been recommended that website owners should optimise website images. There are two good reasons for this:
(1) From our findings, internet users use Google images to find websites and information.
(2) It is widely known that Google doesn’t just look at text on a website but also images!
Convinced? No doubt the next question is, how do you optimise your website images?
First consider how Google views them. When Google looks at the images it will check the filename and alt text (this is the code which generates the image on to your website).
This is how the image code will look like:
<img src=”http://www.angelseo.co.uk/images/angelseo-logo.png” alt=”Angel SEO Logo”>
So as you can see from the above example, the first section is where the image is located - it's the path to the file (i.e. where the file sits on the server) and the file name.
The second part (alt) is the name of the image.
There are three things to get right here:
(1) Choose a good file name for your images;
(2) Create a good description for your images; and
(3) Make sure the description of each image matches the content surrounding the image so everything is relative.
What's a 'good file name'? It's one that helps Googlebot understand the meaning of your image. So for example, "mount-everest.jpg" is a good file name - "DCS001.jpg" is not. Avoid overly long file names as Google may ignore them.
What's a good description? It's one that would concisely describe the image for a user, if they weren't able to see it. For example, "Mount Everest at sunrise".
For both file names and descriptions, avoid including too many keywords as Google may class it as keyword stuffing (this is when Google deems that you have included those keywords just for the purpose of getting your website ranked better).
A final consideration is that with the rollout of Google Caffeine, page load time has become increasingly important (see 'Fast websites rank better' for more info on this). You therefore need to make sure your images are optimised from a size point of view.
So to round up, apart from targeting standard search result pages in Google, Google images is also another good source of getting extra traffic and consequently extra sales.