Optimizing Images for Better Search Engine Result Placement

Rivista users who regularly upload content are no doubt familiar with adding meta descriptions and keywords to articles to increase the visibility of that content to the various robots indexing web pages for search engines. While traditional html pages are the results most often found in the SERPs (search engine results pages), other media such as images, video, maps and books are also returned. It is important to correctly identify these other kinds of content, like images, in order to optimize the site for the search engines.

For our magazine publishers, the opportunity to optimize an image arises when these photos or gifs are loaded either into articles or pages or into the gallery editor. Before uploading the images, keep these tips in mind:

• Use keywords to name images. Name the image Coit-Tower.jpg rather than image.jpg. Separate terms by a hyphen (which search engines disregard), but try to limit the terms to three or less so that a maximum of two hyphens will be used. Do not use underscores.

• Don’t clump keywords (coittowersanfrancisco), as the search engines will not break down this name to its key terms.

When uploading an image to an article or page, the html editor tool (I will insert image here) makes it easy to optimize the image by adding alternative text, or alt tags. After selecting the image from the server files, simply fill in the alternative text field with good keywords while avoiding keyword stuffing, which Google is skilled at detecting in alt tags as with other content.

For an image of Coit Tower in San Francisco, you might choose the key phrase “photo of Coit Tower in San Francisco.” Note that you don’t have to use capitalization or complete sentences, but some choose to because the wording is visible in text-only browsers or when the image cannot be displayed. (For a look at how your pages look in text only, go to http://lynx.isc.org.)

To optimize images in the image galleries (Rivista’s gallery tool), contact someone on our team to discuss further. Depending on how the templates for your site are coded, we can set it up so that the title or description fields automatically pull information used to index the content on your site.

Joel Gales Sullivan is Content Manager at Godengo and an avid student of search engine optimization, especially in regard to its use with Rivista. If you have questions or comments regarding optimizing your site, please contact her at joel(at)godengo(dot)com.

Posted by Joel on October 8, 2007 at 01:04 PM in Search Engine Optimization | Permalink

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