Using images cleverly for SEO

Arun Venkit March 2, 2009 1 comment

In general, many neglect SEO for images and some avoid due to ignorance. Using images for SEO is as important as adding Page titles and SEF URLs for SEO. Also, it helps a lot in Google General Image search, as well as product image search.

To start, the first step is to make certain that you use the ALT attribute on your website Logo and further add descriptive captions in the text as alt attribute around your images, photos and products as a standard practice. And the second step is to avoid giving meaningless names to the images and be sure to name the image, relevant to site page title or keywords and add to your website HTML code. This helps search engine spiders to understand better the overall theme of the page and display search results accordingly.

For people who have no idea about writing Alt attribute and naming image, it will look like

<img src=”http://www.macronimous.com/images/seo-e-book.JPG” alt=“SEO E-book” width=”109″ height=”114″/>

How images help your site SEO by using photo / image sharing sites?

Here are few ideas using Flickr.com, Picasa, Imgur,  Shutterfly and many others:

· Upload images including your business brand logo, products and site theme pictures

· Write suitable unique titles and keyword rich texts for each image and if it is a product image, mention product name and if possible with a brief text

· Add Tags to each image with your most significant keywords

· Compose good descriptions and add a link to your site with keyword rich anchor text

· Make sure the images are public

· Add the photo pages to social sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon

Word of advice – do not stuff keywords to the images and also do not add irrelevant keywords to the images and as a result don’t get a chance of being banned, So be careful and work smart 🙂