Optimising Images on Your Site

A very juicy water mellon

With the concept of “universal search“ gaining ground, it is becoming more and more crucial to optimise all content on your site for search including videos, pdf, podcasts and images.

This blog post will focus on optimising images on your site. 

As an example, if you wanted to optimise an image on your site for the keyword “juicy water mellon”,  implement the following three simple steps:

1) Image Filename:

Make sure your image file has an optimised name such as water-mellon.jpg and not image.jpg

<img src=”images/water-mellon.jpg” mce_src=”images/juicy-water-mellon.jpg” width=”257″ height=”329″>

2) Image Alt Tag:

Make sure all your images contain a keyword rich alt and title tags (the text you see when you hover over the image)  Example:

<img src=”images/water-melon.jpg” width=”257″ height=”329″ alt=”juicy water mellon title=”picture of a juicy water mellon”>

3) Image Caption and surrounding text:

Make sure your image has a descriptive caption under it and also make sure that the text surrounding the image is both thematic and semantic (ie is related to your image).

If you follow the above simple steps, you’ll have a good chance of your images being indexed and ranked in search engines’ image search algorithm.  This will drive more targeted traffic to your site.