Should SEO Techniques be Used for Images on Websites?

The considered naming and tagging of images can be a very effective way to improve your SEO efforts. The placement of keywords in image tags is just as useful as in the textual content of your website. It is important to avoid the temptation to stuff keywords into these 'hidden' tags as the leading search engines are more than capable of detecting such underhanded techniques. A legitimate use of keywords, however, integrated into the use of images in a website will increase keyword rankings in search engine result page and help your audience find you online.

The most basic way to get your images working towards your SEO goals is to include relevant keywords, written like a caption to the photo, with hyphens between the words. Besides this fundamental rule of SEO, there several other methods of optimizing your images for search engines.

The Right Images : The first step is to find the right images to use on your website. You can do this either through creating and using your own images, hiring a professional photographer, or obtaining free images from the web. There are plenty of sites offering free, Creative Commons licensed images, such as Flickr and iStockPhoto which are probably the best option for image publishing on a budget, as the photos will be optimized for use on the web. It is important to remember however, that in terms of SEO, originality is the key, and the use of a professional photography is the only way to obtain images that are original and suitable for use on the web.

Alt Text: These images can then be used for SEO by writing descriptive alt text to help search engines determine what the image contains. Alt text (alte ative text or alte ative attribute) is used as a substitute for the image, stating its purpose and is particularly helpful in making images readable to search engines and useful for SEO.

Anchor Text: Similarly, the anchor text, the clickable text in a hyperlink, used as a link to an image can be used make an image more detectable to search engines, and to seamlessly incorporate SEO-friendly key words into your website.

Content Matching: Search engine algorithms are highly sophisticated and as such the only way to get to the top of the results page is to employ fair SEO practices. This involves matching all elements used to label the image - the image url, alt tags and anchor text – to the wider content of the web page to recommend the entire page as high quality and relevant.