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Search Engine Optimisation Training Course
Lesson No.15 -
SEO & Images
by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au
It’s a fact today that images are an integral part of webpage design and
content. Having pictures makes your site more vibrant, alive, and user friendly
in many instances compare to a boring plain text site.
This lesson is about helping you understand how search engines see your
pictures, and what you can do to influence what they see.
What you see is not always what the search engine gets
What you see and what the search engines see when they crawl your page is not
the same.
The reason is simple, many coding tricks, including the usage of CSS now allows
us to make our site appearance much more user friendly, while maintaining a
simple and easy-to-read page for the search engines without all the unnecessary
clutter of layout junk.
The easiest way to get an idea of how the search engines see you page is simply
by looking at it from a text browser. You can do that easily by looking at the
cache version of your page.
Here’s my page as you see it:
And now, here’s my page as the search engines see it:
The problem with pictures
The main problem with using pictures on your page when it comes to SEO is the
fact that the search engines don’t read pictures.
In a text version browser only (just like what the search engines see), pictures
simply don’t exist at all, no mention of them at all. That’s clearly another
reason why when you use a picture link instead of a plain text link, this one
has much less value.
Search engines can read your text link through the anchor text of this one, but
since pictures are not read, the links from them don’t have anchor text! The
image link will then be interpreted as a plain URL, which is by far the lowest
value for the search engines.
The “ALT” attribute
Do you remember the popular saying: “Do good things and you’ll be rewarded”?
Believe it or not, but everybody isn’t as fortunate as myself or yourself to be
able to enjoy any type of webpages or browser display on internet.
This is why accessibility functions and tags have been created to help people
who can’t enjoy pictures for example to still be able to comprehend what your
site and the link of your picture (if you have one) is all about.
If your heart is kind enough to take on the extra steps to help those people
better enjoy your site, you are simultaneously doing yourself a favour.
The “ALT” attribute has specially been designed to compensate for a picture that
cannot be displayed, either because of a loading error, either because of the
usage of a text browser only.
That is, instead of a picture, what you will see in the information you entered
in the “ALT” attribute.
The “ALT” attribute is located between the <img> tags of a picture in your HTML
source code as seen here in bold for my first picture:
<img border="0" src="/images/seg-homepage.jpg"
width="458" height="317" alt="Search Engine Guy Home Page">
The important point here is the fact that search engines can’t read pictures,
but they can read this “ALT” attribute!
What happened is that in the case of a picture link, the “ALT” attribute will
then become the anchor text for the picture link!
Now you just dramatically increased the value of your images links.
A
Word of Caution
The main purpose of this attribute is still to provide the best description
possible of what the picture it replaces actually is or what the link does.
Do not go in there stuffing loads of keywords, or you may just end up being
penalized for over-optimization and being a spammer!
That doesn’t prevent you to have a nicely optimized picture anchor text link,
just be honest with yourself and apply moderation.
Exercise
Today’s exercise is to make sure that all your images on your site have an “ALT”
attribute, regardless of whether or not they are picture links.
Make the “ALT” of your regular pictures descriptive, possibly without keyword if
it’s not related. Don’t go call a table corner picture “make money online, best
way to make money, make more money online, make money online stuff”, calling
this picture “border frame corner” may be way better.
Meanwhile, when using the “ALT” on a picture link, you can be more SEO oriented,
but still with moderation, if you have a picture link for your newsletter, “Join
my Make Money Online newsletter” may still be acceptable, but “make money
online, best way to make money, make more money online, make money online stuff”
still isn’t.
1. Learn How
to Sort Out the Competition
2. Do
Your Keyword Research Homework
3. Refining
Your Keywords
4.
Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.
Mapping Your Site Structure
6.
Understanding Links & PageRank
7. Sculpting Your Site Structure
8. Cascading Style Sheet
Design
9. Using Wordpress
for SEO
10.
Setting up Your Analytics
11.
Engineering the Title Tag
12.
Optimising The Content
13.
Optimising The Description Tag
14.
Building Internal Links
15.
SEO & Images
16.
OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17.
Link Building 101
18.
Beating Your Competition
19.
Building External Links
20.
Using Structured SEO
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