Optimizing your images may seem like a straight forward process and in many ways it’s quite frankly. However, it’s one of those processes that I find many over look when they are looking to preform search engine optimization on their site. People know they should be doing it but they don’t for many reasons (laziness being the number one reason I find).

I’m going to walking you through the process I use when optimizing Images across the 3 websites I run. When optimizing your images you want to look at two key parts: Title & Caption. However, this is already taking into account that you’ve chosen a relevant image for your article and that you are using a file type (JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP) supported by most of the browsers out there today.

Title: This is the title that shows up when you hover your mouse over the image. If I’m placing an image of the movie poster for Superbad in my article. I would use the title: Superbad Movie Poster

Caption (alt text): The “alt” attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Our “alt” text is a brief but accurate description of the image. If we continue with the Superbad Movie Poster example. I would have the “alt” text as: Poster for Superbad movie starting Michael Cera & Jonah Hill.

By making sure you’ve the title and caption (alt text) filed out on your images. You’ll sleep safe at night knowing that search engines like Google and people using alternate technology like screen readers will be able to gain information about the image. One other item to rememeber is to store images in a directory of their own. You never wat to have your images spread out in  numerous directories and subdirectories across your domain. You may want to consider consolidating your images into a single directory (e.g. YourDomainName.com/images/). This simplifies the path to your images and keeps your site nice and organization. Clear and consis organiztion is a key success factor in search engine optimization in my opinion.

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