Useful tips about SEO for images
Images are often ignored when it comes to SEO, despite the fact that every major search engine has it’s own search domain for images. Paying a little more attention to naming scheme and additional tags inside the image tag can make a big difference in SEO for images, and therefore search referred traffic.
Handling images when writing articles for your site should be as carefully considered as the content itself. After all, and image is a users first point of view, and the same can be said about search engines.
Tips relating to SEO for images in web pages
Name your image meaningful
This one seems most obvious, but often ignored Name the image meaningful and according to it’s content. Instead of DSC00456.jpg, call it sunset-in-italy.jpg (do not use spaces or underscores in names, use dashes instead)
Use the TITLE attribute
Make use of the “title” attribute, adding more meaningful information that helps not only search spiders, but also enables hearing impacted users by providing a popup of the description.
Use the ALT attribute
Using the “alt” attribute is not debated anymore when it comes to SEO, but should be part of any clean web design. Just imagine your image is missing or the path incorrect, the visitor at least knows that there is supposed to be an image containing what’s described in the alt tag.
Add caption
Placing ample and descriptive text around the image, wrapped inside a caption tag helps search engines index the images and gives users a detailed description of the image content.
Store images in descriptive folders
Storing images in separate, descriptive folder will add to SEO value, as their path will be visible to spiders in the html markup.
Host images locally
Many webmasters like to save on traffic and space cost by linking images hosted on other sites. However, a user clicking on them will leave your site and visit the hosting one. Ensure that you’re actually hosting the images, even better create a different host, like “images.website.com to decrease page load time.
Avoid duplicate tags
Never use duplicate “alt” and/or “title” tags on two or more images. That is content inside the tags, but of course duplicate tags itself should be avoided. If necessary, add an increment descriptor at the end, like “series-1”.
