Optimising your images is a great way of driving more people to your site and can be a very useful SEO tool. Amazon gets a huge amount of traffic from image searches and Google gets around 200 million image search per month – that’s a huge amount of potential traffic to your website.

Here are a few useful tips for effectively optimising your images:

First off, you should ensure that the images you use are relevant to the content either on your site, page or specific post. So if your using an image of the Atlantic Ocean, it should be in a post about the same thing.

You should also make sure that you name your image properly, using whatever keyphrase is relevant. Don’t just leave the default name given to the photo by the camera, as you so often see on people’s websites. So if you’re image is of an example of good logo design, you should title the image ‘logo design example’, or something else similarly suitable. Make sure you don’t use the _ key in between the words in your title, as Google doesn’t read the space and will read the three words as one, meaning you won’t rank for your chosen keyphrase.

Always utilise the alt tag on your image, where you’re basically renaming your image again in a slightly different way. So in the previous example, you should put the alt tag as ‘good example of logo design’.

You can also use image descriptions to optimise your images, adding a brief summary of what the photo is (making sure to again include your keyphrase).

If you follow the above steps, and include your image with relevant content (if it’s a blog post it should be over 100 words), then you should find that you begin to rank highly in image searches for those keyphrases, which will in turn drive natural search traffic to your website.

Hopefully you’ll now have a good grounding in how to properly utilise image optimisation in your web design, which should in turn increase traffic to your website and help with general overall search engine optimisation.

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