Della Baez

Understand how to make images searchable using quick SEO Sydney tips for novices. Here we describe step by step the things you can do to get spiders to recognise your site’s images.

One thing that people really do not exploit enough is Google’s (and other search engines’) image search. Do you ever pause to think about how many image searches are done each day? While it is true that content comes first in search engine optimisation, it pays to remember that images are just another form of content in themselves, and making your images searchable as part of your SEO Sydney scheme can actually have big rewards for your pagerank as well as the number of visitors coming to your website.

The trick to making images searchable is to provide accompanying content or features for them that search engine spiders can actually access. To do that, you need to accompany images with text.

One way of doing that is to make sure that the names you give your images even before uploading them to your website are sufficiently descriptive for the engines. Why name an image IMG0123.jpg when you could actually name it Boy-with-dog.jpg or something to that effect? Textual description is key here, so try to capture as much of the image in the name you give it.

Now comes the most important part: when you upload the image to your site, make sure you take advantage of the Alt Tags feature. “Alt” here stands for “Alternate”—sometimes your publishing software or program will show this option as the “alternate text” option. This box typically shows up as an empty field you can fill out in the Image Properties box or Image Upload box when you are adding images to your site. You should fill this out with keywords and descriptions of the image. Think of it as a place where you get to expand on the description you started in the title.

The key is to focus on important keywords in the Alt Tags, so try to get as many relevant keywords as you can in there while still keeping the text fairly concise. Do avoid spamming keywords here, though: as with every other spamming practice in web development, it just does not pay.

Finally, you can put captions on all your images to make sure they get sufficient accompanying (external) text to help search engines identify them properly. Follow all these SEO Sydney tips and you should have searchable images on your site in no time.