So much time is spent on constructing a website that is optimized to the search engines. But not everyone pays equal attention to the images on the website. We do think in terms of meta tags and title tags; however, did you know that by optimizing the images on your website, you can enjoy even more focussed traffic? Also, your visitors will have a better experience on your website.

Major advantages with optimized images are:

• Reduced page load time

With this in mind, lets take a look at what you need to pay attention to while optimizing images:

Name of the file

Consider this - is 8946.jpg better or is redrose.jpg better? Remember, when you name the picture file appropriately and this name relates to the image, people doing image searches will find it easier to reach your site. It is also easier for Google to bring your website up in the search result. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Size and quality of image

This is a delicate one. Your image must not only be of the right size but also be of good quality. If the image quality is low, the page takes less time to load but might get a low rank in image searches resulting in visitors not finding you at all. If the image quality is high, the image search rankings are high, but the page takes time to load, in which case if your visitor has a slow connection, they might not want to wait all that time.

Can you strike a balance here? Yes you can. Here’s what you do. Have small images of low quality that can be clicked to the high quality image. This means quick page loads, your visitors knows what the image is and also have the option of clicking on the image to see the bigger version. This way, your image search ranking stays high. So have thumbnail images with a description of the item and link this to the high quality image for those who want a better look.

Text

It is mandatory for all images to have a short alt text to describe the image. It is this alt text that the search engines use to know what your image is about. This helps them direct traffic to your website via image search. For disabled visitors using screen readers, alt text tells them the content of the image.

Captions

The text around the image and the caption must be indicative of what the image is. You can’t have an image that has nothing to do with the text around it. Google does not like it, either.

Text in the images?

Forget about text in the images unless absolutely unavoidable. The best text is that which the search engine spiders and screen readers can read. If you must have text, use CSS to create a background, so that even though it looks like a part of the image, it is actually part of the html and the text is also visible.

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