Pearsonified recently wrote another great post addressing a topic I wanted to cover here on my blog, he beat me to it though.
The topic of discussion is “Google Image Search”. Last month I received my highest number of site visitors. After carefully studying my web stats I noticed I was getting a lot of site visitors through Google image searches. More specifically, the Google image searches were landing my new site visitors on this page, my Christmas wallpaper I designed in December 2005.
Doing a Google Image Search for “Christmas Digital Art” you will see that my site comes up number 3. That my seem a rather random keyword search, and nothing to be proud of, but it’s obviously not as random as you might think, as take a look at the web stats I attached.
Even though the bounce rate was high, meaning people visited my site and left it within a few seconds, some of those people did stay and had a good look around.
What is the point I am trying to get to; the importance of labeling your images correctly.
Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items (source: Pearsonified):
- A
src
attribute specifying the URL of the image - A
width
declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels - A
height
declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels - An
alt
attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO - A
title
attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image
I must mention, before any of you readers point it out, that I do not strictly comply to these guidelines set out by Chris, for example, I rarely specify a width
and height
attribute, and I usually only leave an alt
tag. However, I always save my images with a suitable, descriptive name, for example, if I was posting a photo I took at a Robbie Williams concert, I would label the image “robbie_williams_at_milton_keynes_concert.jpg“.
More specifically my code, up till now, would read:
After reading Chris’s article, and seeing my web stats, I think I may take even more consideration into tagging my images. So should you, it might be worth the extra effort.
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