Creating Search Engine Friendly Images

It is great to have images on a site. However, search engines cannot read those attractive images. It is important to ensure your site is accessible and can be understood by the visitors.

Vanessa Fox at Official Google Webmaster Central Blog gives certain tips to ensure that. These are:

  * Don't put the bulk of your text in images. It may sound simple, but the best thing you can do is to put your text into well, text. Reserve images for graphical elements. If all of the text on your page is in an image, it becomes inaccessible.
    * Take advantage of alt tags for all of your images. Make sure the alt text is descriptive and unique. For instance, alt text such as "picture1" or "logo" doesn't provide much information about the image. "Charting the path of stock x" and "Company Y" give more details.
    * Don't overload your alt text. Be descriptive, but don't stuff it with extra keywords.
    * It's important to use alt text for any image on your pages, but if your company name, navigation, or other major elements of your pages are in images, alt text becomes especially important. Consider moving vital details to text to ensure all visitors can view them.
    * Look at the image-to-text ratio on your page. How much text do you have? One way of looking at this is to look at your site with images turned off in your browser. What content can you see? Is the intent of your site obvious? Do the pages convey your message effectively?

Vanessa shares her SES Chicago conference experience where she participated in Images and Seach Engines session. She writes, "panelists pointed out that shoppers often use Image search to see the things they want to buy. If you have a retail site, make sure that you have images of your products (and that they can be easily identified with alt text, headings, and textual descriptions). Searchers can then find your images and get to your site."

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