Traian Neacsu’s latest article is titled “IMG Tag SEO and Image Optimization – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO”. [SEO Article]

Traian Neacsu’s latest article:

IMG Tag SEO and Image Optimization – The Complete HTML Reference Guide for SEO

Almost all SEO professionals admit that the IMG element is important for search engines, at least to a certain degree. If your website is selling image stocks, then it’s crucial. But since almost all web sites depend more or less on images, optimizing them for search engines (and humans) seems logic.

The purpose of this article is to describe some SEO techniques that can be used to improve image crawling, indexing and ranking.

We’ll start with a very minimalistic sample IMG element, as seen below, and at the end of the article we’ll end up with a highly SEO friendly tag. Bear with me, it’s a long (but useful too, I hope) article.

Unfortunately lots of designers and/or programmers stop with the minimum implementation of this tag.
How do search engine understand images?

Here are some signals used by search engines to read, understand, categorize and rank images:

– Colors, size and image resolution – Image “bucketing”: is the image a face, photo, drawing or a clip art? – Weighting text by its distance from an image and extracting context from text around them – Overall theme of the website (i.e. adult websites will have all images labeled as “adult” and filtered) – ALT attribute (alt content influences rankings) and TITLE attribute (doesn’t influence rankings, but provide additional context) – Image file names – Total number of thumbnail images that are located on the same webpage as the ranked image – image tagging on third party photo sharing websites like panoramio.com or flickr.com As you can see there’s plenty of things search engines have to take into consideration when crawling images, and the above is not even the complete list
Always add the ALT attribute to the IMG tag

Just by simply adding the ALT text you will provide search engines more information about the content of the image and improve your chances of that image being indexed in Google Images:

The only attribute that get’s indexed by search engines for the IMG tag is the ALT attribute.

The ALT attribute should also be keyword rich, not just a list of keywords. When writing you alternative text, try to think of how you would describe the image to a blind person in less than 25 words (150 chars or fewer). That sentence will be your ALT attribute.
Use the TITLE attribute

The TITLE attribute is not getting indexed by search engine bots and it will not improve your rankings, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. The TITLE attribute is displayed as a tooltip on mouse hover in many browsers and can provide additional information to users
Use keyword rich file names

You’ve probably noticed the unfriendly file name used in the previous examples: 0012adsds.gif. This type of names don’t help search engines understand the image at all and should be avoided.

There’s really no information search engine bots could extract from that file name. Instead your file names should describe the image a bit. If appropriate, you could add your targeted keywords to the file name.

Traian has almost a decade experience in online marketing and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, an SEO Services that provides Internet Marketing Services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit: http://www.pitstopmedia.com

** This new post is submitted by Traian Neacsu.

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