Most website owners have included images on their site at some point in time. Many of them will upload the image, save it and forget about it, but they are missing out on all the benefits an optimized image can bring to their SEO efforts. Having an optimized image on your website that shows up in a search result can bring you major traffic. Images can let people know that your site has exactly what they are looking for before they even visit it.
Since a search engine (SE) can't read the actual image, the key is to optimize the text relating to the image. Search engines need to determine how relevant your content is to the keyword being queried in order to know whether to show it in the results. Here are three ways you can optimize your images.
Use keywords in your image title. Search engines can read file names, so make yours count! Let's say you are selling a black couch on your website and you are including an image. You want search engines to know what the picture is so that it can be shown in search query results for "black couch". If your image title is "pic050110.jpg", a SE will have no idea what the picture is or if it is relevant to the query. However, if you name the image "black-couch.jpg", a SE will know exactly what that image is and that it is indeed relevant.
Include alternate text. The alternate text is another good place to use your keywords and give a further description of the image to search engines. Here you can expand on your file name to be even more specific. In the black couch example, you may use "Used black leather couch". Now a search engine can determine the relevance of your image to a more specific query as well.
Optimize all text surrounding your image. Using a keyword once is not enough to show search engines that your image is relevant. Be sure to optimize all the text around your image for that keyword as well. Use the keyword in a text caption below the picture. Make sure the rest of the text on the page includes the keyword too. When multiple references are made to the same keyword, a search engine is better able to determine relevancy.
There are many other things you can do to optimize your images, but these are three strategies you can easily implement right away to get you started.
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