Are you tagging images on your site ?

Posted by Kashif on October 4th, 2008
Tags: Blog Traffic, Blogging, Webmaster Tools
Tagsphoto credit : Customtrophiesinc
If your answer is No , then you might me missing some extra traffic as there is a huge quantity of internet users that use image search engines ( like Google image search ) to search images on the web . If you use images that are relevant to the content of your site then chances are that those images will bring many targeted visitors to your site which is only possible if you have tagged your images wisely . Continue reading to find out how to do this .

If you look into the HTML code of your image then you will find something like this :

<IMG src=”http://www.mysite.com/album/me.jpg” alt=”My childhood photo”>

There might be other HTML attributes withing IMG tag but the one that we will be working on is the ‘alt‘ or ‘alternate text‘ attribute . The alternate text of the image in the above example is ‘My childhood photo‘ which is a short description about that image . This short description will not only contain SEO value but will also serve the following purposes :

  • For users having low speed internet connections, who may opt not to load graphics
  • For users who are using a pay per transferred data connection
  • For people using hand held devices etc

So whenever an image is not shown , its alternate text will be shown . It is not necessary that you add the alternate text to all the images on your site . In some cases where images are just used for decoration purpose ( part of your site template / layout ), the alt tag can be left blank like this alt=’ ‘ or you need not to worry about it because it is left blank by default .

lets do a little experiment by searching for images using an image search engine . In my case I only use Google image search . My search term is ‘smilies for your blog‘ and here is what I get in my search results :

Google image search result for the term Smilies for your blog

As you can see the image search results indicate three important ingredients

  • Image thumbnail
  • Short description ( this is Not the description used in alt tags )
  • URL of the site which contains the image ( Not the URL of the page containing the image )

You can see in the above image that the thumbnail shows smileys image which I used in one of my previous blog post which was about adding smileys to your blogger blogs . The alt tag or the alternate tag used for that image was ‘Smilies for your blog‘ which is exactly what we searched using Google image search . The short description shown along with the thumbnail is the title of the page containing that image . So if you use alt tags and page titles effectively then you can easily optimize all the images on your site and in return you will be getting extra hits to your sites only for images .

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