Ah! The brother of written text. Images! A website can be only text, but it’s the images that really spice up a site. From color to relevant pictures that tie into your site’s purpose, images aren’t a space waster. Since content is king, your sites images don’t have to be sitting on the sidelines of SEO purposes.
The most basic SEO image technique
Some occasional readers of Seoboy are just looking for an additional zap to their site. Well, the most basic way to include your images into your SEO plan is changing the names of your images to include keywords, phrases and locations.
Examples of worthless image names:
34.jpg
10004323.jpg
group-picture-small.jpg
image0312.jpg
DC10000023.jpg
bathmat.jpg
Examples of better image names:
plumber-arlington-va-contact.jpg
vizslas-hungarian-pointers-adoption-mitzy.jpg
car-audio-faqs-logo.jpg
Most of us have images on our computer that have vague references or no real reference at all to what the image is. An image may be labeled adequatley enough for you to find it in and image library, but it’s not enough for making it count for SEO. Yes, your image library will look redundant, but it’s not about you, it’s about squeezing every bit of content to conform toward the purpose of your SEO – to generate leads.
Unorthodox Image Labeling
If we’re talking about renaming images to maximize every part of content for SEO let’s look at other places you can use this technique.
1. Logos – sure, you could put “company-name-logo.jpg” as the name of the image as most people do, but putting the logo image in the keyword format is a good move.
2. Web Graphics – Yes, even those parts of your website that have mundane names for establishing the look of your site are target for enhancement. The boxes, bars, background titles can all be renamed to incorporate the naming scheme.
Take the first step
Since this about baby steps in image use of SEO, that’s all I mention for now. It doesn’t do any good to mention “alt” tags or leveraging photo sites. Take a look at the images on your website and how they could be leveraged to add to your SEO objectives. If you have hundreds and hundreds of images, focus only on the images on your main page and focus your image titles to be in a sweet niche that you can exploit.
