Search Engine Optimisation Part 3

Search Engine Optimisation and Images

Fancy getting your images into Google image search or just attract more users? If you do then these are the following settings that I would advise to be used when placing images on your website.

Firstly, make the file name for the image relevant, rather than useless. What I mean by this is, your camera might take excellent photographs, but who is going to search for “img_3838978273.jpg”? I can’t imagine very many. If it’s a picture of a tree then name it something like, tree.jpg or if it’s a cat, name it cat.jpg. These are very simple commonsense practices, and yet so many people do not take advantage of them, follow the theory and it will benefit your website.

Secondly, when you place an image on your website, give it an alt tag. An alt tag will specify what the image is of and is good practice for complying with w3c guidelines. The reason we use alt tags is for web browsers that are having trouble reading the image data and can provide an alternative solution to a box with a little red cross. The red cross may appear still but the alt tag will also be present, and this works to your advantage very well, when you have people with some degree of disabilities, such as those who are partially blind, programs that they use can read the text on the page, and will inform the user the image is of, a tree or a cat.

Thirdly, if you are aiming for your images to appear in Google image search, then be patient because Google can take quite a while to update its image search, since it is not as fast as the web search function it has.

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Search Engine Optimisation and Sitemaps.
A sitemap is a page or location that you can visit, which will list all of the pages within your website, this is useful for your users, so it’s worth having. It will allow a user to quickly identify the page that they wish to visit, and as a result becomes a vital page within your website. With that information in mind, having a link to your sitemap, in html format, within homepage or every page of your website, will be very useful, because in addition to a user being capable of using the information, when ever a spider/robot appears, it will read the entire sitemap and as a result, crawl every page on your website, unless instructed otherwise.

The second useful thing about sitemaps is that if you use tools such as Google Webmaster, then you can submit your sitemap directly to the search engine and have a spider crawl the sitemap when ever you update the information. This becomes a fantastic option when you need to create and remove a lot of pages within a short period of time, and should also help you get your website indexed within Google faster, if you are just starting out.