Image SEO

So far we spoke about title optimization, importance of heading tags, anchor text but we just mentioned images for once or twice.

Even tho the weight search engines give to optimized images is not heavy as the title tag it still does help us in our SEO Optimization venture to rank higher in the SERPs. I have seen many web masters avoid optimizing their images because they are not aware of it, or simply because they don’t think it is worth the time.

Well let me tell you, on one of my web sites I had a typo on the image alt tag, and on my stats i kept seeing organic traffic coming to my website with a typo word. I was like going mad and worried that I might have made a typo and maybe my business would not be taken serious. I kept digging deeper and deeper into the side and checking every single paragraph for the possible typo. It ended up that I had the typo on the image alt tag *shocking..no?*

Okey with that said I just wanted to show you that I have experienced and that image optimization DOES help. But now, lets see how to optimize a image (but not for image searches). I want to avoid image optimization for image searches since we want traffic to our content and not directly to our image.

Lets presume we have a search engine optimization website and we want to use a image logo instead of keywords in headings.

The next image is NOT what I would call optimized

    <img src=”logo.gif” width=”180″ height=”60″ />

Neither this is what I would call image optimization

    <img src=”logo.gif” width=”180″ height=”60″ alt=”Logo” />

While this is what I would call SEO optimized image

    <img src=”logo.gif” width=”180″ height=”60″ alt=”Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” />

Oh hold on, neither this is image optimization, actually this would be keyword spamming (and might harm you)

    <img src=”logo.gif” width=”180″ height=”60″ alt=”Search Engine Optimization (SEO), SEO Service, SEO Company, SEO Expert, SEO software, SEO Tools” />

Keep in mind, image alt tag can HELP us in SEO Optimization of our web site, but as any other tag that search engines read, it can harm our web site too if we abuse and over use it (avoid keyword stuffing).