I wasn’t wrong when I started discussing the importantance of image search a couple of posts back. I was talking about photos and how do you optimize for them and use them to your advantage. Image search is growing. According to a reference 15 to 16 percent of searches are for images. IDC Doors, the company I was talking about in the previous post gets about 30 referrals from the Image Engines. Serenity Health, another company of my interests gets over 400 referrals. This is a lot of traffic from image searches. And this is great. It gives us an opportunity to try new ideas with their photos and create better image traffic too!

Some Tips for Photo Optimization:

1. Obviously use alt tags. Customize them for your website’s keyword and target area of business. For example, IDC Doors could use this as an alt tag: Custom Garage Doors, Minnesota.
2. Name your photos logically. This too is another place to use a keyword. Do not use hyphens to abundantly and cut out the underscores.
3. The theme of the page should be consistent with the image.
4. There should also be supporting text to enhance the image’s visibility.
5. Set up external links to go to the page with the photo or photos.
6. Duplicate content applies to photos too! Make sure not every duplicate image on the website is indexed.

Image searches are becoming more useful when one is searching on the Internet. The images tend to return more relevant information at times. As people are starting to look for a wider range of content, it is important to have your videos, images and multi-media content returned in the top pages, as well as, your website.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 8:17 am and is filed under General, Content & Copywriting, Driving Traffic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.