using an image on your blogs, websites and forums
We all know that images can make a page come alive with color and imagery and can make even the boring text come alive to your reader.
Optimizing those images is very important to help make the search engine crawler happy as well and that helps people find you which will make you happy ( translate traffic to your site)
Did you know that there are certain things you should be doing when you put up an image?
From the time you find an image ( and I will not need to remind you that the image should be legal to use), there are certain things that need to be done
1. When you upload an image, be sure to use keywords in that file name. The reason for this is that search engines NEED to interpret the contents of the image ( image file) To give you an example
When you upload an image of a cat, then you would name it cat.jpg rather than the generic image0032jpg.
When you want to use more than one word, be sure to use hyphens to separate the words and leave out stop words as they will not add any value at all. Stop words ( or no value words) are "the" "a" "she" "he" for examples.
2. When you upload an image, then you need to think about the alt text and it is really important to create good keyword wording as the search engines regard this is very important for SEO. You need to limit the alt text to 150 characters as the search engines will not read anything beyond that and you need to put the "main keyword(s) at the very beginning of the alt text.
- On a side note when uploading an image you will see two boxes <title text> <alt text> The title text( should be different than the alt text) is what people will see when they mouse over an image, the search engines will not read the title text, but it can add more clarity to the image for your readers.
I found a fantastic learning tool for all of you that will teach you the rules of "alt text" content generation and it will teach you everything about the topic of Alt text or Alternative text.
WebAIM is an amazing site for the simple reason it was created to expand the web's potential for people with disabilities so browse and see what they are doing. For the purpose of digging into images and the alt text I am going to refer you to
Introduction
Adding alternative text for images is the first principle of web accessibility. It is also one of the most difficult to properly implement. The web is replete with images that have missing, incorrect, or poor alternative text. Like many things in web accessibility, determining appropriate, equivalent, alternative text is often a matter of personal interpretation. Through the use of examples, this article will present our experienced interpretation of appropriate use of alternative text.
Remember over time, you could gain a considerable amount of traffic to your site just by doing things properly with your images.
Let me know how you do..k?