Andrew Melchior

2-3 weeks ago I had the chance to do an interview with a writer, Adam Sutton, for Marketing Sherpa.  He regularly contributes to the blog and newsletter content on MarketingSherpa.com.  The interview was about Image SEO and the different techniques you should use to optimize images for search within the major image search sites such as Google Image Search and Yahoo Image Search.  The article is really good with some very helpful insights related to Image SEO.  He and I met for about 30 min. and discussed the topic and I am mentioned in the article for this quote:

“I don’t think I can remember an instance where we’ve met a client and done a site analysis, or looked at an image gallery they have, and they had all the alt tags filled out. Literally never are the alt tags filled out.” Andrew Melchior

Anyway, I thought the interview was great and the article was great as well so I thought I would post about it here real quickly.  You can find the article here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31221.

Here are my suggestions for basic steps you want to take for high-quality Image SEO.

1. Name the image file something relevant to the search term you are targeting.
2. Insert a proper Title and Alt tag for the image related to the search term(s) you are targeting.
3. Include related content around the image that is related to the search term(s) you are targeting.
4. Link the image to another page on your site that deals with the topic.
5. Include an image caption using the target term(s).
6. Tag the image if possible.

Those simple steps will really help your images get found in search.