It is fairly common SEO practice to place keywords within the alt attribute in order to retrieve rankings for specific searches. However, it is virtually unknown what other practices should be used in order to rank the image higher within search results.
Over the years Google has fought its battle against alt attribute spam; webmasters can no longer keyword stuff and expect results. However, it is still legitimate to place keywords within the alt attribute within reason.
Other ways to SEO images
- Title attribute
- The title attribute helps visual readers read text, find important objects and helps visually impaired by showing a popup which displays what is inside the attribute. The title attribute should be used to describe the image/link to help out visitors and search engine bots.
- Keyword in name of image
- This will not only help visitors find images easier, but will help your rankings by giving an extra keyword for search engines to chew on.
- Keywords in anchor text
- Anchor text is the text used to link to an image. The text is located as <a href=”">anchor text</a>. Anchor text linking to an image will tell search engines what the image is about.
- Surrounded by text which describes/mentions it
- This is something hardly ever mentioned in SEO forums. Like most SEO, this is just speculation. However, some believe the text surrounding pictures or graphics will help Google and other SEs rank them.
- Within Google Sitemaps enable image search
- Enabling enhanced image search adds your images to the Google labeling game which allows visitors to label pictures, graphics and other images. By doing so, your images are given extra keywords which might be searched for. Even if you don’t wish your images to be labeled by random people, it is best to join the service to increase brand visibility.
Written: Sep 23, 2007
Tags: images, seo
Sialkot
November 9, 2007 @ 1:12 am | Reply
Nice article dude…
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Jack
October 22, 2008 @ 6:36 pm | Reply
Thanks for mentioning this article over on EC.
I still don’t understand that new “no link” rule for blog post urls in /Community. I can understand why it could be a problem with self promotion spamming — but when the url/post is absolutely relevant to the topic being discussed.. eh.
Anyway, I appreciate the tips there, and the above info. I’ll try to get into a better habit of being more descriptive in the title. And will keep the alt a bit shorter but still to the point.
Surrounding text may be an issue with me when I apply this to a portfolio gallery, which will just be images.. but perhaps I can throw in a short descriptive intro to satisfy the spiders and help my images index a bit better on the whole if the speculation on that method does hold some weight with the search engines.
Thanks.