Making a website search engine friendly is important. Title tags and META tags usually come to mind, but optimizing your images can attract more visitors to your site and enhance their experience when they get there. Fully optimized images decrease page load times, allow people with disabilities to understand the content they can’t see, and bring new visitors conducting image searches. The best ways to optimize images on your site are:

Give your pictures appropriate filenames - this helps search engines determine contents, especially for the image specific searches (Google’s Image Search). Naming a picture of a butterfly, “butterfly.jpg” is better than naming it “1234.jpg”.

Image Size and Quality - Lower quality images increase loading speed, but they hurt rankings in image searches, as well as detract from overall user experience. High quality images help image search rankings and look better, but they cause pages to load slowly - a real problem for visitors with slow connection speeds.

One good way to get the best of both situations is to use a small, lower quality image on the page that links to a higher quality image file. Then the page loads quickly and users who want a closer look can click on the image. Image searches will also have a high quality image to index which betters your chances of a higher rank. On an e-commerce site you should use small thumbnail images next to the description of an item with a link to a higher quality image for potential buyers.

Alt Text - images should include some short alt text that describes the image. Alt text helps search engine spiders see what your image contains so they can context your page better, and in turn direct more targeted traffic to you. Alt text also helps disabled visitors know what the image contains. Writing an HTML image tag with the alt text should be an effective solution.

Surrounding Text and Captions - It is important that the surrounding text and image captions are consistent with the content of the picture. According to the Google Images FAQ: “Google analyzes the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption and dozens of other factors to determine the image content. Google also uses sophisticated algorithms to remove duplicates and ensure that the highest quality images are presented first in your results.”

Avoid Putting Text in Images - it’s best to have the text actually readable by search engine spiders and screen readers as a caption. One alternative is to create your graphic with everything except the text, then write the text by itself (formatted to your liking using CSS), and then make the graphic a background image of the text (also using CSS). This makes it look like the text is part of the graphic, when in reality it is part of the HTML.

Lookin’ Out for You,
Arthur Browning