WSBM LLC – Sylacauga, AL

There is a new scenario beginning to happen with search engine results. In the previous years, search for a term and you are likely to find regular listings along with sponsored results. This meant the only way to get to the top of the listings was directly with content, or text. Do a search now, and you will see blog results, image and video results, and maybe even news or twitter results. What does this mean now? It means you can make your website a better search engine target by optimizing your website images.

Images by themselves do not allow a search engine spider to see what they are. We can see it, because it is a visual. But from a search engine spider’s point of view, it is just an images about something. The following are 9 basic steps you can take to make sure you have your images optimized on your website.

1. Stick with search engine preferred picture formats, such as PNG, JPG, and GIF (in that order)
2. Name images with the keywords they are. For example, if the image is of a sunflower, then name it garden-sunflower.png, instead of 123tgh.png.
3. Use dashes instead of underscores because search engines normally treat the dash as a space
4. Always include the ALT tag in the IMG tag. This allows a keyword phrase to explain what the image is
5. When using your images as a link, make sure you use the TITLE tag for the keyword phrase of what the image is
6. Try to ensure the image ALT tag, the page title, and the image name are the same (if possible)
7. Use width and height attributes to specify what the dimensions are for your image
8. When inserting the images, use the image url in a search engine accessible folder instead of something like the wordpress image folders
9. Ensure you maintain a high text to image ration on the page. In other words, use the images sparingly.

Those are the basic properties you need to follow on your website to ensure the images are optimized for the search engines. To take this one step further, and ensure the users are completely satisfied with their experience, and the search engine spiders like what they see, here are 5 more things to consider:

• Use unique images the user has not and can not find anywhere else
• Ensure the images are high quality and explain what they should explain
• Make the images appear above the fold. One way to do this is to “float” the image within the content. This ensures it is right at the top of the article or web page
• Ensure the other images and content are related to the main image
• Link to a larger version of the image. This is done with wordpress where you can insert a thumbnail, and then link the original version, or size of the image.

If you can follow these steps for your images on your website, you will be sure to help with the rankings. This is because you will have a search engine optimized website and each and every one of the images with be a target for the spiders crawling around looking for images. So, the next time you are writing an article or blog post, ensure you add some images to the content. It helps the users and attracts the search engines.

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