BruteForceSEO Review

Most websites rely heavily on images to explain something to the site’s visitor or to give the page a more visually appealing look. Examples of the latter can be a photo of the owner of the site or some kind of map that can explain something to the visitor more easily than when using text.

Search engines can’t “read” images at the moment. It is not true in SEO-land that “An image is worth a thousand words”.

One of the most commonly known Search Engine Optimization tips(seo tips) that go around has to do with the way you name and tag the images that you use on your site. It’s fairly commonly accepted that Google measure your site’s worth by looking at the text on your blog, also Google’s spidering bots will take a look at the code you us in your image files.

I don’t suggest you to stop using images on your sites. Use them where needed, but keep in mind the consequences of using those images. They normally hide content which is available for your users from search engines.

To overcome this problem, the easiest way is to use the alt-attribute of your image. You can use “labrador dog” in the alt text if the image is about your labrador dog. This will also help search engines find your image when people are doing an image search.

If the image is also a link, please remember that don’t make the alt text “link to my labrador dog”, the < a > tag will have made that clear. I recommend you use some keywords in your image tags, it is still legitimate if you don’t stuff alt tags with all kinds of keywords.

Using alt tags in this way can help those wor are vision-impaired. Just like search engines, they can’t see the page, so they have to rely on the text that’s on your page. It wouldn’t hurt to think more about this for many sites.