Friday, February 09, 2007

Optimize for image search by alt tags

Optimize for image search.
Have you seen the image search in google. Most of you have some images in your sites and blogs. But they don’t come up in google search. Do you know the reason? The answer is very simple, you need to optimize for image search.

Ever heard of the alt tags, this is the basic for the images to appear in google search. To display any image in your blog you write these codes, “img src” and then give a “=” and you put the URL after that. And the image appears, right. But you forgot the alt tags, and close the “< >” code. Rather use this after the url, “alt=”name of the photo””. This small code will make a huge difference in the search results.

For the text search, there is a huge amount of competition, which makes your ranking for competitive keywords in search engines very difficult. But the images don’t face that much competition, so you can manage some hits from there. The image below describes the alt tags. If you put your mouse arrow on the image, it will give you a text, which is its alt attribute. This simple alt name, may take you photo to the top of image search.




alt tags for image search

A tip for blogger. People try to upload photos to blogs. This won’t help you to get the alt tags. You may enjoy the unlimited bandwidth of blogger or other blogs publishing websites, but your image traffic won’t increase from this. The solution for this is, open a free geocities website. It is free so you won’t have to pay anything. A yahoo geocities account can be used with a free yahoo account. Then simply logon to your account, and upload a picture. Make sure that the picture is not any more wider than 400 pixels. Then upload it, and copy the full URL of the image. As suggested above use the img src command to put your picture on the page. This is very simple, and you won’t have to pay anything to do this. This is how alt attributes work with blogger.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

you said that its better to have a geocities account. In this case how do i upload my photos in my blog(Im using blogspot at google) from the geocities website?

tech expert said...

get the url of the photo which is uploaded in geocities.
then use the img src command to get that picture in the blog.

read the alt tags optimization post, it is explained preperly with picture!
cheers!