Optimizing Picture Tags

Optimizing picture tags is one of the tactics you can adopt to enhance the popularity and visibility of your domain in image search engines. Almost all web pages today have some images displayed including business name, company logo and pictures or graphics of products. There are numerous websites that are fully image based. However, these fully image based websites will probably be less search engine friendly due to the lack of texts or contents. This is because search engines do not index images, nor do they index any text available in image format.

In order to provide a textual replacement of the picture and to enable users to get information related to the image, an alternative type of tag called alt tag is utilized. By adding alt tags to your pictures, search engines can easily recognize the contents present in your sites. The proper use of alt tag in the web page is the best known SEO tip for optimizing pictures and picture tags.

Alt tag optimization, alternate image creation and placement of images are the three milestones for successful image optimization. Always use alt tags for the images in your website. Adding good keywords to the alt tags can enhance keyword frequency of your contents thereby scoring you higher ranking. Your title tag, Meta tag and body text should contain the keywords selected for the alt tag. Rather than repeating the keywords, try to use two to three specific keywords. The keywords should also match the original image. You can also insert special tags like comments, captions, location, themes, and cross-grouping. Be sure that the alt tag is not too long. It should not go beyond 7 words.

Alt tags enable visually impaired people to gain more accessibility to your websites. These are also useful for those who browse the web with pictures turned off, and surfers who are harassed by really slow connections.

When choosing image formats to display pictures in your site it is best to use either the .jpg or .gif formats. Such image formats can reduce the size of the images and use only a few bytes, while maintaining high quality and help in optimizing picture tags.