At present there are over 100 million websites on the internet of which, a large majority try to compete in being that first link on the most popular search engines seen today. In order to accomplish this, a website should be SEO (Search Engine Optimized), there are hundreds of techniques to archive this but today we are just going to concentrate on images.

As most people know, content on an image cannot be used for SEO as search engines cannot read static text on an image. What they can do is read the name and alt tag of an image and index it that way.

This technique isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds, in the past web developers have crammed their alt tags full of keywords for search engines to read. But recent advancements especially in the Google engine would now see this as keyword spamming and can actually reverse the SEO process by lowering a websites rank.

The best way to go about creating SEO friendly images is to ensure the image filename is a description of what is actually shown in the image and that any spaces are replaced with hyphens (-). This also ensures that all images are URL friendly when being accessed directly.

The alt tag should include a limited number of keywords relating to the website, a limited number keywords describing what is in the image just like the filename except that spaces should remain as spaces and not be replaced with hyphens. This ensures that when a search engine crawl’s the site, it sees the keywords an additional few times per image.

Below is an example of an SEO friendly image tag:

<img src="/images/product-silver-kettle.jpg" alt="keywords being targeted relating to the image and webpage" width="100" height="100" />

To sum up, ensure that spaces in your image filenames are replaced with hyphens and don’t add too many keywords to your alt tags, especially ones that don’t relate to the rest of the webpage as your site may be seen as keyword spamming.