Friday, October 15, 2010

Images on Your Website – SEO Perspective

Fancy graphics can be attractive. They have an impact, but they can take away the traffic of your website, so it’s important to optimize the images properly. There are several factors to consider when optimising Images on your site:

  • File Names: Giving pictures an appropriate file name will help Search Engines determine content, especially for Image specific searches like Google’s Image Search.

  • Image Size and Quality: It is important to take care of image size and quality of the image. For large Images, it is best to place a small thumbnail Image next to the description, and then link it to a high quality Image.

  • Compression: It is essential that Images be optimally compressed. Properly optimised Images will decrease page load times and bring new visitors from Image searches.

  • Alt Text: All Images should include an ALT text (shown when the user places the mouse over an Image) that describes the Image. The Alt text helps Search Engines understand the Image content and context.

  • Surrounding Text: It is important that the surrounding text and Image captions are consistent with the content of the picture.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. To know more about search engine optimisation (SEO) , please visit the site http://www.newpathweb.com.au