IEO - Optimizing Images for Search

Everybody sing along "S-E-I-E-O!!!!!"

By now we all know what SEO stands for and why its great. (If you don't, skip this blog and start with one for beginners!) But a big part of SEO is tagging your photos with the correct contextual information that is needed to get them indexed. Keywords located within the Alt=" " tag of your image code are all a search engine like Google needs to properly index your media.

As it relates to branding you can subtly increase your search reuslts by tagging photos with your clients company name followed by whatever the picture is. For instance alt="Pepsi Holiday Party" or alt="Canon Summer Retreat Picnic". In both cases we are giving search engines terms to index for relevancy ('holiday party' and 'summer retreat picnic') but we're also correlating that data with our client's name. Thus users searching for either mages of summer picnics will include our clients photos.

What we don't want to do is overstuff the alt= field with things like "canon picnic april photos summer photography D80 new product buy" as search robots have learned to eventually filter out tags like these. Less than five words in an alt field is usually safe.

Thus your code should look something like this:



<img src=”http://clientserver.com/images/canon_retreat09.jpg” alt=“canon summer retreat” width=”50″ height=”150″/>




Image search is still an emerging frontier but it can still drive a ton of traffic to your site. Until companies like Polar Rose perfect image search technology, relevancy is all we have to markup our image files. So do it, do it right and happy tagging!