How And Why To Optimize Your Web Images

The three best items to have on your website are great content, lucrative keywords and optimization. These are key factors for generating traffic and potential customers. However, there is more to content than you might think. With the rise of Google’s Universal Searches, web goers everywhere are not just searching for articles but for images, videos and maps. Still the written word is the most powerful tool for your site even in these new media streams. So how can you optimize an image or a video for the search engines? With words, even if the item being searched for is not written content.

If you have images, you need to supply them with content for search engines. What does this mean exactly? Search engines cannot read pictures, but they can read picture descriptions, or alt text tags. These tags are meant to be a sort of replacement for the image. When a viewer hovers over the image, the alt tag will appear, giving them more information.

You can optimize your alt tags by using one or two keywords that are relevant to the image and maybe even your homepage. The tags should be no longer than one or two sentences and should not be drowning in keywords. If you load up your alt tags with keywords, search engine spiders will notice the excess usage and could lower your rankings. Remember to keep it simple. Over-optimized and long alt tags will not produce as many click-throughs as a shorter one would. You want the whole title to appear in search engine ranking pages (SERPs) so that they stand out, especially since you are optimizing for blended search.

Another useful tip is to shrink your image sizes. If they take up a lot of memory, they will bog down the page load. Viewers do not want to wait more than 30 seconds for a site to load up; therefore, you want to simplify the image further so that it will load faster.

Once your images and videos have alt tags and load faster, your site will have increased traffic. The more searches your site can be a part of, the better. Your site may have content everywhere. It’s time to branch out and discover where you can put it.

By: Bob Speyer

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