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As the saying goes, an image is worth a 1000 words, but this is not the case for SEO. While this is true to you and I when we are attempting to compare a list of very similar cameras, or reading a map, search engines are able to discern very little from most website images. However this article should help you to provide more to a search engine as it attempts to index the images, text, and other data from your web site.

by Curtis Friedl

Source: MarketingPosition 

To a search engine, an image is only worth a few words. A visit to the website for the movie Pirates of the Caribbean displays a large flash based image, links, and text. Unfortunately, the links, quotes, and other info on this page are largely invisible. While this page can be exiting to a human viewer, search engines view this page with less excitement; in fact Google locates only 32 words from this URL.

Above: Images need to have SEO techniques applied too! A screen shot above shows the text that Google was able to index from the URL http://disney.go.com/disneypictures/pirates/ on December 23rd, 2006. Much of the content that an engine can obtain from the Pirates page is locked as an unreadable image.

Below: A screen shot image of the page that a human visitor would see. Go to the URL or see the image below for spots where text is locked into unreadability on this page. Notice that at point A. there is navigation through the Disney site and Pirates site, at point B. there are a number of quotes about the movie, and at point C. there are links for Disney help, related motion picture URLs. Yet none of this information is available for indexing by Google. This presents SEO opportunities.

Nearly all of the content that is part of this flash based image and page is lost to a search engine. There are several steps that you can take to maximize the ability of an engine to at least discern some of the important content from the a page or image like this.

Rescue words from images
First and most importantly when you can rescue words from the images do so. Since the value of an image to an engine is significantly less than normal text, this is a good place to start.

It may mean that you include a no script tag if the entire or most of the page is an image like the Pirates site example.

This may mean that you strategically take text that is in the image or flash content and place in normal text on the page.

Use the Keyword in the name of the image
When naming an image the use of the keyword in the image name is beneficial. This can be helpful for image searches on an engine, as well as to help the engines to understand the idea that an image may be trying to provide and it may provide a better understanding of the page’s overall theme. So, pirates-caribbean-dead-mans-skull.jpg would be an improvement if the old file name was skull.jpg. (No, .gif or .jpg does not matter, so use the image format that makes sense for your image.)

Place the image caption next to the image
Place a caption next to the image, with the keyword in close proximity to the image on the site.

Place the keyword in the text content that surrounds the image
If the image is placed in the body, and surrounded by text content having the keyword physically close to the image will also have benefits.

Use Alt tags
The use of Alt tags as part of the site design is important. While it is postulated by many SEOs that search engines rarely use Alt tags purely for ranking purposes, many agree that it more likely that Alt tags are used by search engines to gain a better understanding of a page’s target keywords or theme.

Above: The image above is a screen shot where I was hovering my mouse over the first image in this article. There is a yellow pop up box that my browser uses to display Alt text like: "Images need SEO too, this screen shot shows text cached by Google."

Use Keywords in anchor text
Anchor text is the visible text that is displayed as part of the url, this is often referred as link text as well. An example of anchor or link text is contained in a link back to this article using text like this SEO for Images, which is preferred over non generic, non-SEO link text like a click here text link.

While these 6 ideas are important parts of site optimization for images, the first one is very important for over all website optimization. Whenever possible the design of a site should include text content for the engines to digest. Even the use of buttons can be improved by positioning the keyword as part of the anchor text over the buttons image using cascading style sheets.

Conclusion

As we discussed above search engines are not able to read the content of images on web pages. If your web pages have buttons or image maps, test is largely in your graphics, opportunities to communicate with the engines are being missed. When a design requirement dictates that you will need to use a graphic, use some of the basic options mentioned in this article to assist the engines in understanding the content of the images on your site. Each one of the opportunities presents an avenue to bring additional clients to your site and ultimate can result in additional sales.

Disclaimer: While the MarketPosition team enjoys the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and we think it has great special effects, the views or opinions of the MarketPosition staff does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of our parent company.