How Can You Optimize Images For The Search Engines

Images can be important to a websites and some websites its more important than others to get google to understand what the images are about. For example an artist would display a gallery on there site showing there work for potential clients to look through, sometimes you don’t want to add much text to the pages so how would you optimize an image for the search engines?

As you can imagine images are probably the most hardest object for computers and internet robots to understand but as time goes on things will get better, in the meantime I’ll briefly discuss what you can do to help the search engines dsicover roughly what your images are about.

Google have a basic program called google goggles which is in development stages but can work out popular landmarks, for example the Eiffel tower would be an easy landmark for google goggles to understand. I would definitely not rely on this for your images but at least you can see that someone is discovering the right path to go down.

The best way to optimize an image is to use a relevant file name, for example if your picture is about flowers then why not call it flowers.jpg etc. Another way to optimize it is is to add a title tag to the image tag and label that with some relevancy as well as writing a brief meta description which is also relevant to the image. You can also add an alt tag which helps both the user and the search engines, if the image doesn’t load up for the user for whatever reason it will display the alt tag telling them what the image is, the search engines also look for this as a way to work out what an image is about.

The above section told you how you can optimize the actual image itself but you can also take it just a little bit further. The image will obviously be displayed on a page so you could also optimize the pages title as well as meta tags and even if you don’t want to write a visible description for the user you could write a short sentence which would help towards optimizing your image as well as your site.

Another idea might be to add a comment feature so users can write comments about your image and in the process the odd one or two might mention the main terms your trying to optimize it for i.e flowers.

So conclude, you can optimize an image but you have to do it manually until the computer boffs figure out a way of reading images etc.

How Can You Optimize Images For The Search Engines

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