The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of Image SEO

When creating a web page or a blog post it is so easy to forget about the ALT attributes of the images.

I for one am guilty of focusing so much on the content, title tag, tags, and internal links that by the time I get all that just right I sometimes fail to remember the ALT text.

Thanks for the reminder.

Nicola,

To be honest I rarely use the title attribute for an image because Google has stated that it holds no SEO value (and many SEOs have independently confirmed this).

That being said, I could see it being helpful if it provided useful information to a visitor such as the time, date, or location an image was taken.

In either case I would not consider it a "must have" for image SEO. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your images even further, such optimizing the file paths, size, and type. However, because their SEO impact is small I chose to focus on "the big three" instead.

Do you also link the images generally? Like to the page it shows on so you have another link or is that not important?

Steve,

You are right, linking to a page an image is on, with relevant anchor text, will also help that image become ranked.

For example, if my image above was on a page dedicated to the Big Agnes Flycreek Tent, and I had inbound links with that anchor text, then it would help that image rank for that keyword.

A few burning questions:
(1) How important would you say the image name is?

I use a lot of id generated images. Once a user uploads a logo or a photo it's a number. Really convenient server side wise. Is it at all detrimental in SEO? The problem is, I don't want to go too crazy with the custom file names because then we get into character encoding and the fun that brings...gets really messy and might be more bother than for what it's worth. I'd for sure use the alt attributes for these images, and the user generated content takes care of the context part. I suppose just the context and the alt tag would tell the SE what the image is.

(2) For images used in the layout(may times over) does it annoy Google if I use an alt tag for the site logo, and change it for locations, for example: I really don't see the harm. Google probably ignores most of the layout elements anyways in the long run.

Clinton

Clinton, again good questions

1. Poorly optimized images will not hurt your website, they just wont help that much either. The way I see it, the purpose of Image SEO is two-fold; (1) to give us a little bump in the SERPS by improving the relevancy of a web-page for a keyword and (2) to have visitors access our site through Image search.

In your case I wouldn't worry too much. If you could automatically assign the images the same name as the title of the business that is uploading it, or even the same name as the Alt attribute that would be preferable. But if you are unable to do that I wouldn't fret, since we all know that user uploaded content will never be perfectly optimized for SEO.

2. Changing the Alt Attribute to incorporate a page specific keyword doesn't sound like a problem to me either.

Christian, thanks again.

Yes - I agree. User generated content is hard to optimize. One problem being the time it takes to write and test the code for fetching keyword identified images. It's possible of course but if I'm going to spend 5 hours on it, I'd rather use the time more productively.

Thanks, your response helps!

Clinton

Well, given that most people believe that SEO is some sort of SEO BEAST.... it would be easily understood when someone makes this simple mistakes.

Personally, I know it took me a while to wrap my head around the proper way to tag a picture (like 5 months).

But for those who take these simple bullet points to heart, it could really provide some additional exposure in no time.

Thanks for keeping it real, I'll be back!

-Dereck

Christian,

I completely concur with your thoughts on the guidelines for SEO. Too often, creators will make the mistake of diverting from a product's relevance. While this is detrimental in text ads, it's even worse when incorporating images as conciseness is key.

Christian,

Is there anything specific to Local SEO image search? What about adding GPS info to local photos? Will that help SEO enough to be worth it? (not using a cell phone camera, so GPS has to be added after the fact)

Thanks!