How to Make Your Page Images SEO-Friendly

Picture paints a thousand words. Although large scale spider-based search engines can only understand text-based contents, images can also clearly illustrate any ideas your content want to convey. Handling images for search engine optimization ( SEO ) is a little bit tricky. It involves simple syndication to make it SEO-friendly. Ignoring image optimization deprives your site from a number of traffic and ultimately from a number of sales. So, in order to make use of images take a part of your SEO and traffic-conversion campaign, here are some tricks you must consider:

1. Use a clear picture but of smaller file size. It takes time for low-speed internet connection to load images from any page with bigger file size. Both spiders and visitors can be impatient to pages that won’t appear so easily.


2. Use keyword to name your image file. Specify file extension .jpg if it’s a JPEG photo and .gif if it’s a GIF. In this way, search engines will recognize this as image and will be included in the listings for image searches by internet users.


3. Always use descriptive ALT tags to contain your target keywords. It serves as a proxy of the image whenever it is unavailable and is required for XHTML validity. Use hypen ( - ) as word separator and no more than 120 characters using the following code :
   
   
   


4. Use image to hyperlink to a page in your site optimally describing the ALT tag. Your ALT tag serves as an anchor text and wherever it points must have a higher authority in terms of relevance to the keyword found on ALT tag.


5. Organize your images in a way that they are close to the text content describing them in full details. In this way, your visitors can figure out easily what you’re trying to say and take time reading more from your pages. Your image ALT tags can reinforce your content topic or keyword in that particular selection.
   

Although the impact of ALT tags for images in search engine optimization is minimal, it is still a good practice to make them SEO-friendly. Every little bit of SEO web design counts.