SEO TIPS: Images and SEO

Are you aware that images are a great way to improve your onsite SEO? With each image that you use, you have the ability to include relevant, highly optimized, keywords and improve your positioning in the SERPs. Most people never bother to tag their images, or too often, use catchy tags that while fun, hold little or no SEO value and miss a great opportunity to kick their SEO efforts up a notch.

All of the images on your website need to be appropriately named and tagged. Many webmasters are careless when it comes to this important task, which shows how careless people are regarding website design basics. Ignoring the potential of images for SEO fails to tap the an important way of enhancing your SEO efforts.

What makes this even sadder is that doing it right only takes a couple seconds to do it right. It is not difficult to spot images that are named as image1, image2, etc, and we see this constantly in companies whose SEO firm ignored the potential available. You’re paying for it to be done right – you may as well insist on getting it! Although you will not be penalized for naming your images in the above fashion, to do so is to ignore the industry’s best practices and ignoring opportunities.

When you want to work with images again in future, either to tweak results or to find and replace them completely, you can easily track those images if they have been properly named. Proper naming of images helps your SEO in the following way: images give you yet another chance to include your keyword in a strategic position of the website! In many cases, the header of the page is an image and the leftmost corner shows the logo of the company. Having keywords in such strategic places  can improve your page’s relevancy to searches being made. So, this is one very good reason to incorporate your keywords in the image names.

The header of the page will be the same across all the pages so you will be naming the same image in each page. Don’t forget this! In these cases, the keyword you have used in one page may not suit the other page. You can save the image under multiple names and use the correctly named  image on each page to avoid this type of problem. Online users will see the same image but for the search engines, the keyword will keep changing with each page in a way that matches with the content of the page.

There is a situation in which this may not work out well for you though. If you have limited hosting space, you may not be able to follow this practice, and in that case should simply use a main keyword for your site, or even your brand/company name. This isn’t the best alternative, but it sure does beat the heck out of “image1” or nothing at all.