When it comes to doing the SEO of your site it might well be that the first thing to spring to mind is not images.  In fact many people consider them rather useless with regards SEO – after all it’s not like search engines can actually see what an image is about is it?

Which is only sort of true.  Search engines may not be able to see the image itself, but but can tell something about the image from what you tell it.  Like much of onpage SEO, using images is about ensuring that you are stressing the right things to the search engines.  It is about what you tell them – and you need to be telling them the right things.

How to use Images Well for SEO

So what is it that you should be telling search engines to help images make a real difference to your SEO efforts?

Alt text.  Remember how we said that search engines can’t actually see the image?  The alt text is your chance to tell the search engines what the image is about, use your keyword here and the search engines will think you are especially emphasising the keyword by using an image about it.

Captions.  Captions of the image tell the search engines a little something about it, and are a great chance to get your keyword in somewhere else in a way that makes sense and helps the reader as well as the search engines.

Description.  The description helps users who hover over the image see what it is about, it is a slightly more involved caption – and again helps the search engines understand the subject of the image.

Not everything is about keywords though.  As we said the search engines are interested in what people want.  Spammy sites rarely take time to put in images, alt text, captions, descriptions etc, so they know if you are doing it you are more likely to be taking time and care over your site.  They also make the user experience (your site visitors) more enjoyable.