Search Engine Optimisation for Images

Posted On: 2013-03-21

So how's your day going? Did you jump into action today with a set plan that you were going to work your way through or was it one of those days when you just picked one of any number of current projects and started to work your way through that?

Here we were supposed to be looking at quite a few hours without power while the power company upgraded the local system so we put together plans that would help us work around the lack of power ... but then it rained this morning and it's understandable that people don't want to play with electricity in the rain ... so the power stayed on we're back in the office working as we normally do.

And I was so looking forward to spending the morning doing nothing but catching up on my reading on the back deck at home ... work-related reading of course.

Speaking of reading ... have you read Google's Webmaster Central Blog lately? If you haven't then you missed an interesting post on March 14 where it was announced that Google now has a "first steps cheat sheet" for people who want to make their websites more search engine friendly.

Of course there's a lot of basic information missing from that cheat sheet ... it is only one page after all ... but even so they do skip over a lot of important information that even beginners should be told about.

However ... and it is a big 'however' ... there's a little gem tucked away in there that is worth thinking about and I'll come to that in a moment but first let's think about what Google has told us about images in the past.

Remember a few years back Google suggested that its spider was becoming much better at reading words that appeared on images? Well now it seems that Google has admitted defeat when it comes to words included in images and so the cheat sheet suggests ways to help Google understand images.

Google suggests that the file name is important and the alt tag is important too ... but then we knew that they were good places to drop a few keywords. And note that I said "a few keywords" ... there's no better way to show that you haven't got a clue than to stuff the alt tag with keywords.

Then comes that little gem that I mentioned earlier. Google also suggests that if you want to help it understand images then you should "write a short caption on the page below each image. Put important information in text rather than in images."

How many of us have ever bothered to use captions? Is it something that we can use on some of our marketing sites to help us rank better?

I know most webmasters immediate reaction would be to dismiss the idea because there is no way that we could use captions on our adult marketing sites but sometimes ... if you spend a little thinking about an issue like this ... you can come up with a solution that lets you take advantage of what Google is offering.

I'm sure that it won't be long before someone does come with a way to make it work for them and then it won't much longer before someone comes up with a way to stuff the caption with keywords that only Google's spider will see.

If you're doing more than just adult the idea of using captions on your business sites is worth thinking about too. I have heard of one SEO "guru" who has found that Google seems to pick the captions up from his business website and use them with the same images that he's displaying on his Google Places page.

I haven't seen anything like that but it's worth doing a little experimenting ... you never know where it might lead.

Of course it's so easy for us to get so wound up in search engine optimisation that we forget that the main point of our websites is to sell a product and we can have the best search engine rankings and it still won't put money in our bank accounts if we're not convincing visitors to part with their money.

With that in mind perhaps you should take a look at bigbrandsystem.com/build-sales-pages/ and think incorporating some of the suggestions you'll find on that page into the websites your building.