Last month, we had a post about image relevance in blog posts. But images aren’t just there to spice up your posts — they can draw in traffic as well, that is, search engine traffic.
When properly used, images can help your blog’s search engine optimization. You’ll need to pay attention to two attributes/HTML tags: alt and title.
The alt attribute stands for “alternate text”, which stands in for the image when it can’t be displayed properly. The alt attribute is a pillar of website accessibility, and is a boon for visually-impaired users and those who use speech synthesizers. But aside from this, the alt tag is the most important part of image SEO.
Adding an alt tag that’s keyword-rich (e.g. “A fake petunia sold at Willoughby Street, a popular street for fake petunia lovers” with fake petunia as the keyword) strengthens your post and your blog in the search engine rankings. While keywords are important, don’t forget that alt text is primarily descriptive text — don’t get too spammy with it.
Next, the title tag tells what text is to be displayed when a user hovers the mouse over the image. It can be less descriptive than the alt text (after all, a long description will not be displayed in full when used as a title), but that doesn’t mean you can’t put in some keywords. In our earlier example, you can simply write in “A fake petunia sold at Willoughby Street” as the title.
Of course, you can’t use these attributes if you don’t have any images in the first place. My old post at Performancing.com lists several sites where you can get free images.
Originally posted on May 12, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
