Optimizing Images

Optimizing your images for search engines becomes a necessity if you are to intercept these people. Here are some image optimization tips:

* Optimize Images for Size – As a general rule of thumb, try to keep your total size of images per page to less than 30K (30,000 bytes)

* Use Quality Images - make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails. Good quality images will entice more clicks from users. Use quality pictures.

* Use Original Photos – just as search engines prefer unique content, they also prefer unique images. Brand them with your logo, trademark or URL.

* Use Consistent Image Formatting – Save photos as JPG files, and other graphic image types as GIFs as search engines will interpret a GIF as a standard graphic image with 256 colors and JPGs as photos.

* Optimize Image File Names - be sure to incorporate keywords into the file name of your images that accurately reflect what the image consists of. The image name will appear beneath the graphic image in search results. It helps to communicate to searchers that they are viewing the desired graphic image.

* Tagging Images – Where possible, you should always tag your images. Take advantage of the many special contextual tags for social sites with image search. Not only are image names given more weight than regular search results, but you can also add special tags such as captions, comments, location, and themes. Try to put labels and captions on key graphic images.

* Describe Your Images with “Alt” Text – use alt tags to accurately describe images utilizing important keywords in the alt text. Alt text shows up in Google Image search results. Proper syntax looks something like: alt="Keyword Rich Image Description"

* Optimize Page Content with the image - Optimizing the page the image appears on is just as important (probably more important) as optimizing the image itself. It’s fair to say that optimizing the actual page for contextual search improves graphic images search.

* Organize File Structure/Hierarchy – It is important to create an image folder on your web server space that's accessible to the search engines.

* Factor in Usability - usability is very important in image search optimization and should always be considered when creating an uploading your images. Just because you show up at the top of image search results, does not mean that people will click on the link to the image and go to your site. Image optimization needs to accurately reflect the image.

* Re-Upload your Images – be sure to revisit your images from time to time and consider re-uploading them so that the search engines can crawl them again. “Image freshness” can provide a hint for the search engines and might affect relevancy of your image search results.

* Create an Image Sitemap on your site – create a separate sitemap page that is specific to your main images that you wish to optimize. The image sitemap would consist of links to the actual images and would contain alt tags for each image. This would help the search engines find your main images and should help with Universal Search rankings.