How to optimize your site’s images

Ever wonder how those images get separated from their website and vie for your attention in search results? Its a fundamental practice that gets often overlooked, but is one of the easiest ways to optimize the content of a page. Its called image attributes, and with a few simple tweaks they can help your ranking and land you some extra visitors.

Search engines don’t view images the same way we do. I can easily identify a photo of a chipmunk in the rain, but search engines only know an image by the <img> tag. Alone it doesn’t do much, but add some attributes and you’ll be cooking up some optimization. Namely, the alt attribute identifies alternative text in case images cannot properly load (maybe due to an error or slow load times), and works double to tell search engines what their crawling, in this case alt=”chipmunk holding flower umbrella”.

Also not to be overlooked is the file name. If I uploaded this image fresh off my camera, it might be named DSC1101.jpg which does nothing for my optimization, but chipmunk-umbrella.jpg is spot on for appearing in results for kooky animal-lovers searching for cute eye candy.

Let’s test it out. Search for ‘chipmunk holding flower umbrella’ and see where this page ranks in search results for web and images.

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