Thursday, June 10, 2010

Optimize Your Images for Added Value


Search engine optimization is not just about some keywords on a website, it is about a process that is applied to many different aspects of your onsite and external marketing efforts designed to increase the flow of targeted inbound traffic. Many times I see images on people’s website with horrific file names and no image alt tags which is not the end of the world but at the end of the day the goal is to make your website 100% search engine friendly not 85%.

Several Reasons to Optimize Your Images:


1. Image Search Traffic: At some point in time people will do an image search for your specific targeted keywords. Having your images appear or at least giving them the potential to appear in image search results gives your brand, your business and your website an opportunity to bring in a whole new stream of traffic to your website or blog. Even if it might be a lesser stream of traffic it doesn’t mean it should be avoided.

2. The Blind: Website users who might not have their eye sight or vision often times use technology that reads image tags for them. By writing out image tags for your images you give the blind an opportunity to find your website as well.

3. Good Practice: At the end of the day it is good practice to want to optimize all areas of your website. An image tag or image file name that is littered with characters and symbols that do not help anyone will not benefit you in any way. I don’t want to say it will slow down your website when it comes to rankings but it is important to realize that search spiders do not like to crawl across a website and read image tags that are just a mess of characters and do not have any rhyme or reason behind them.

SEO is the process of many ingredients working together at the same time which includes having very efficient image file names and alt tags. Search engine optimization is a combination of multiple processes working together at the same time to accomplish a common goal, a goal of increasing inbound traffic to your website through every means possible.



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