With putting most of their focuses on page content(textual) and still concentrating on SERPs(Search Engine Page Results), Webmasters and SEO guys are widening their area of interest and they are extending their hands on images. You may wonder whether images play an important role in page optimizations? Yes they do.
Image Search Optimization is described as the procedure where websites associate their webpages with similar content in order to increase their relevance to a unique keyword on image search engines like www.picsearch.com, www.pixsy.com, www.fotosearch.com and many others. Like Search Engine Optimization(SEO), here also the aim is the same, that is, to get a good organic search listing. Thus the task is to make the outcome good by getting a good ranking in the major search engines in order to get a valuable traffic from them and thus increasing the website value.
Depending on the products or services you may be offering, it may play an important role in optimizing your site for image search engines. Not only that, even if you are not offering any products or services, for the purpose of increasing organic referral traffic on your site, optimizing the images for image search engines can play a great role. Image search engines may be built for finding the images by their respective keywords. But the fact that image search features hold a major proportion in majority of the search engines traffic is rarely known.
But some major differences between Search Engine Optimization and Image Search Optimization (ISO) is that in ISO, there is not much to do for better optimization. The ISO can be described in other words as a subset of SEO. It just focuses on getting a better rank on image search engine results. Unlike the usual SEO process which involves many important conditions in offpage Optimization and onpage optimization, in ISO, it is nothing. Producing quality images which are very much accessible to image search engines and providing some better descriptions about those images is almost the work anyone will have to do for ISO.
Some of the checklists for ISO are as follows:
Naming of images: Always provide some better names rather than DSCOO1.jpg.Separate the image names with some underscores or hyphens e.g blackbook.jpg is always better than black_book.jpg.
alt Attribute: provide some small description of the image in alt attribute of the img tag .As a good designer, do not leave the alt attribute empty, at least provide a single word.
Text around image: Place a combination of keywords that best describe the image.
Image Resolution: Always provide the image in a high resolution. If possible provide various resolutions
Image accesibilty: Always ensure that the image directory is fully made accessible by the crawlers.
