Optimising images for search engines
| Getting your web site seen is the name of the game. But while we strive to make our sites as search engine-friendly as possible there may be something were missing...the images.
Google – arguably the best search engine around – includes in its powerful suite of tools an image search. We should, therefore, not overlook images as a promotional tool in the quest for eyeballs. The Google image search has its own algorithm, rather than being a by-product of the normal text-based search, so this means there are steps we can take to influence the outcome of a query. Keep It Meaningful Firstly, use meaningful and relevant image file names – image1.jpg etc. just won’t cut it with a search engine spider. Words should be separated out with either an underscore _ or a dash -, e.g. beer-widgit.jpg or smoked_salmon.jpg Always include alt text for every picture (the text that pops up when your mouse goes over an image). Do not simply stuff the alt text with keywords though. Use your top priority term for that image. Carl Farmer, Promotion Manager at Sitekit Solutions (sitekit.net) said the most important factors in Google image search friendliness are the image filename, the alt tag and the text on the page close to the image. “Use terms that people are likely to do image searches on,” he recommends. “Few people would do an image search on a non-pictorial term such as ‘Highland Council’ but there would be for a term like ‘Scottish Highlands’.” Bandwidth-eating Spiders Of course, many people do not want their images showing up in search engines. Some are concerned about copyright theft and others are worried about search engine image spiders eating up their bandwidth allocation. On the first concern, it can be argued that any visitor can ‘steal’ an image from your site anyway by the simple expedient of right clicking the mouse. And on the image spider worry, too, there is a fix to exclude some or all images from their attentions. The question is really one for the individual webmaster and their judgement on whether optimising images for search engines will drive sufficient additional traffic and sales. In our next feature, we will look at:
|