SEO Info: Image Optimisation

I read an interesting article by Sue Hallam few days ago with some tips on how to optimise images.

Image optimisation is a useful tool for optimising a website. Depending on the content, it can be a very good way of driving traffic to the web pages. One of our old clients who’s site contained pictures of cakes used to get lots of hits from images.google.co.uk.

Sue’s article suggested some of the following tips for optimising images:

1. Use keyword rich filenames eg hellebores_001.jpg.

2. Make use of the alt tags – describe what the image is.

3. Use the image on a relevant webpage. For example, a selection of images featuring hardy perennial flowers should be used on a page devoted to hardy perennials.

4. Try to create internal and external links to the images. A blog post like this is an excellent opportunity to create external links to images on your website.

5. Using the Google webmaster tools, it is also important to make sure that the image search is enabled for your website. Participating in the Google Labeller service lets users label and describe images too. Labelling images can be quite fun and well worth filling a spare 5 minutes everynow and again!

All of these tips will help ensure that the images on your site will be ranked higher in the search engine results.

One great firefox extension for searching through the Google image results in called PicLens. Install it and get searching!

If you search for SEO Nottingham you will find one of my pictures take from the Nottingham Eye which was used in a previous blog posts