subject: Seo News: 2013 The Year Of Image Seo [print this page] One of the easiest ways to optimize the content of a page is to focus on the images. Most pages contain images, whether they be photographs, illustrations or icons. With a few simple tweaks they can help your ranking and get you some extra visitors. Optimizing Images? But Why? The big problem here is that search engines cant see images. Wait, let me rephrase that; they can see that theres an image, they can even recognize images in terms of their pixels , but they cant assess the content based on the image alone.
SEO experts agree that 2013 is the year images will drive SEO.
From the Constant Contact blog:
Its important to note that search engines still just rely on text to find the right images in the first place change them in any way.
Its now more than ever that your web copy focuses on your visitors, and not so much on your keyword targets. When a user lands on your website, your main objective should be to convert the user in some sort of way. The copy of your website will have a pivotal role in converting users while shaping the image, tone, and perception of your brands web presence.
Many website owners commission hundreds of SEO articles to be written for distribution to article directories. This wasnt a good idea when it was very popular and it is an even worse idea now. Stop a minute and think how you look to readers. A link from an article directory is a good thing, in some cases, but ALL content on the web connected to your business should be of the highest quality and most article sites are far from that.
If you have access to the other image details, edit those to make them as relevant as possible, too: metadata, captions, labels, transcripts, description fields.
There are also some time saving tips you can take to streamline your re-use of images. If you make use of many images, you should create sub-folders within the images folder and categorize images according to the nature of each image. A good tip is to use the keyword associated to the collection of images you have created to make retrieval easier. If your keywords made of more than one word (if they are key phrases instead of keywords) then you can use hyphens or underscores to separate words. Whatever method you choose, be consistent so you never struggle to find what you are looking for.
A final tip is to be consistent in the manner you optimize as well. You should be able to handle your images with ease anytime you want to make any changes to your website. Your SEO firm should be in synch with your web designer, with optimization suggestions passed on to the web design team to set up your website for the best possible search engine performance. This is a team effort, but it really is not any more time consuming than doing it wrong. Start right, finish right, and youll always maximize your SEO efforts.
