How to optimize your images with Aaron Wall

Posted by Aaron Wall on 07 May 2010

In an extract from his 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies book, SEO legend Aaron Wall shows us how to get more visitors from image searches on search engines by using keywords to optimize your images. Aaron runs SEO Book site and helps his wife out with PPC Blog.

In some industries, such as those with celebrities and adult-related topics for instance, image searches comprise a large portion of search volume. But search engines struggle to deliver good results for these searches so you can help them and get rewarded by having your images do well.

Most search engines find it too computationally expensive to read pictures. Acknowledging this problem, Google went so far as to launch an image labeller game which pairs contestants against each other to describe pictures.

The easiest way to make your images visible to search engines is to help describe them. You can:

• Use a filename that describes the image
  
• Use hyphens to separate words in the image name eg, my-name.jpg
  
• Use a descriptive image alt attribute to describe the image
  
• Make the alt attribute 2-5 words long including words related to the pages core words. (So not a long list of keywords separated by commas.)
  
• Use a descriptive image title to describe the image.
  
• Generally less important than the alt attribute, the image title can be a bit longer and read like a sentence.

Each of these methods helps search engines better understand what the image is about.

Web pages are created out of hypertext markup language (HTML). Here is an HTML source code view of what a descriptive image presentation may look like for a picture of a navel orange:

<img src =”navel-orange.jpg” alt=”Picture of a navel orange” Title=”Picture of a delicious navel orange.” Height=”200” width=”300” /">

And here's a picture of a navel orange ...