Search Engine Optimisation Advice

As part of the quick fire seo tips series we are going to discuss the importance of images.

Images are one aspect of search engine optimisation that are often missed by web developers and are an integral part of the modern day search engine and search engine user. Here are the key bits of information you need to remember when designing or optimising your website.

Image Name

Search engine spiders are now capable of reading the name you give every single image on your site and by utilising keywords in the image name will not only keep the keyword focus on the page high (which aids search engine optimisation) but engines such as Google will also include these images in their Google images search results – a great way to generate more traffic to your site.

Alternate Text

The Alt text attribute is an important element required to give accessibility to users. Giving images a descriptive alternate text allows people aiming to optimise their website an additional way to introduce secondary keyword text. The goal is not to spam the page with additional, repetitive keywords but instead to give the reader and search engine spiders a way to describe the contents of the picture.

The other important element to the alternate text attribute (which most web developers forget about) is that for a web page to be W3C compliant all images require the alternate text attribute. Even though the alternate tag is required to be present it does not always need to be populated e.g. alt=“”.

For presentational images there is no added benefit from providing a descriptive alternate text, this is only really required for other images. In practical terms this means a background image does not need the alternate tag of “blue shaded background image” where as an image of an Audi A3 would best be suited with an alternate tag of “black Audi A3 turbo diesel”.