A commonly missed opportunity when building web sites is the failure to search engine optimize images. In a competitive world, any edge that you can gain over your competition should and must be taken. If you fully optimize your images it is more than likely that your competitor has not, because seldom do, and you will gain an edge and this edge may push you higher in organic search rankings. We need focus our attention on two attributes: the file name and the HTML ALT tag.
FILE NAME: Most images on web sites have generic names either the nomenclature which is assigned by the camera (IMG_1234, DSC_7897 etc) or are assigned the generic name of a web template e,.g photo1, photo2, image1, image2 etc. While these are extremely convenient that are useless from an SEO perspective. How many people with search for IMG_1234? It is important to rename all of your photos which include the primary search keyword. For instance, I am sports photographer and as such it is important that I include the name of the event in each photo. So, if my camera outputs file# IMG_1756, I will rename that to keyword.jpg now we have a file name that makes sense to a search engine by carrying the event name and I retain the file name for my library purposes (which is very important, trust me!) If you can be more specific with your file name, you should be, but as I may shoot 1,000 to 4,000 images at an event, I have to take a more general approach.
ALT tag: this allows you to assign description to an image in the example above – keyword.jpg – I would add a more specific description e.g ” Shalane Flanagan winning the 2009 CVS Downtown 5K in Providence, Rhode Island”
Now, we have both our image name and image ALT tag with descriptions which include search terms.
Also, make sure that you turn on the search images attribute in Google.
