October 26th, 2008

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SEO Tip Video #8 – Optimizing Your Pictures

As promised in the last SEO Tip Video, here is the SEO Tip for optimizing your pics. If you are just into hosting your pics and don’t care about traffic, then this does not pertain to you. I have actually gotten a lot of traffic due to certain photos, so tweaking your pics could generate some decent traffic.

SEO Tip Video Summary

Two primary things that you should use are alt tags and title tags. Use them both, but make them the same.
No keyword stuffing in alt tags and title tags.
Have a picture for each of your keywords, to include plurals and different versions of the keyword.
What ever the picture is of, try to make that the title and the alt tag.

Using Flickr

When using Flickr, put keywords in title, and in the tags. Use the tags.
Write a good description and feel free to put a link into the description, but put the link within the first couple of lines of the photo description.
Add the photo to related groups to increase exposure.

I was just reading a post by Wayne, Using HTML to define an image, which kind of parallels this post. If you have no idea what an alt tag or title tag is or what the code looks like for them, check out Wayne’s post.

Alt Tags and Title Tags

The primary purpose for Alt tags is that when a visitor drags their cursor over the photo, the text that you put into the alt tag will appear in a little box while the visitors cursor hovers over the photo. It also allows those who are visually impaired to know that their is a photo of some widget or another on the page..that’s why you want your alt tags to be accurate.

Title tags give a title to the picture that is only important to the search engines. Do your visitors really care what title a picture has? No not at all.

To see the title and alt tag of the picture to the left hover over it with your mouse first to see the alt tag, right click on the picture, and scroll down to properties to see all the information for the photo that I have given including both alt tag and title tag as well as a bit of other info. And no, I didn’t optimize this photo with good keywords, just me with a glass of pond water.

Adding photos that use these tags, will give your pages a bit more information for the search engines, and adding pictures in general will help to liven up your pages.

Do you use these types of tags for your photos for SEO purposes?