In the never ending quest for greater website optimization one may wonder whether or not images may be optimized. Obviously, the physical image itself, e.g. mycat.jpg, consists of a blob of digital pixels that cannot be analyzed by the search engines’ indexing software. So, how can images be optimized?
The first thing to know about this is the way that HTML is used to display images on a web page. This is done with the IMG tag. Here’s the basic use of this tag.
<img src=”images/mycat.jpg”>
This tag tells the browser the name of the image (mycat.jpg) and what folder (directory) it’s located in (images). There’s clearly not much information here for the search engines to use except for the name of the image file (mycat).
So, the first thing one can do is to give their images descriptive names. Here’s an example:
my-cat-skippy-kitten.jpg.
With this name you’ve now given the search engines something to work with.
There are additional elements to this tag that may be used to provide the search engines with even more information they can index and use. Here’s another example of this tag using the same image name:
<img src=”images/my-cat-skippy-kitten.jpg” alt=”Picture of my cat Skippy as a kitten.” name=”Skippy” />
As you can see this tag has two new elements: ‘alt’ and ‘name.’ Using these elements of the tag provides a way to add textual information–readable by the search engines–associated with this specific image.
What Does Google Say About This?
Google says that it uses all indexable information surrounding an image that is contained in the HTML. You can view Google’s video on this by clicking here.
In this video Google also points out a further optimization technique which is to place images in folders the names of which are words that contribute to the understanding of the images contained in them.
Let’s say you are going to displays images of cats for yourself and several of your friends. Instead of putting all the pictures in one folder called “images,” you can create additional folders and distribute the images amongst them. For example:
images/mycat/
images/joescat/
images/sallyscat/
According to Google, the folder names (e.g. joescat) will also be indexed and used in formulating search results.
Yes, this is a fairly labor intensive technique. However, if you want to take your website optimization to another level I would recommend optimizing your website images.
Use the image “alt” attribute to describe the image. Search engines see this and it also adds viewable information on mouse over. Also, website readers for the blind read this for the website visitor.
I usually don’t leave comments!!! Trust me! But I liked your blog…especially this post! Would you mind terribly if I put up a backlink from my site to your site?
Feel free to post a link from your site back to ours.
what a stunning blog post about google. I’m frankly very stupefied that that has not been articulated earlier to such a great length.
Did someone say joescat? hehehe. ;-)
Actually, you have a good point about search engines. You got to put text/words to what the image is because search engines won’t know what’s in the image, or what is important in the image itself