Make Your Images Understandable To Search Engines

Posted byVlad Zablotskyy 16 Comments on Make Your Images Understandable To Search Engines

Picture speaks lauder than words. This of course is true as far as human beings are concerned. But it is not so with those little spiders that often crawl your website or blog. In fact they can use a little help to understand and make sense of the images posted on your blog.

To have them understand better your images, you can effectively use two attributes alt and title inside the img tag on your pages and your blog posts. If you are not familiar what do they stand for here is a short overview:

  • ALT attribute is text value that is displayed instead of the image itself, should your visitor have disabled to load images when visiting your website. Some times you can notice this text value loads slightly faster than the image itself.
  • TITLE attribute, which should not be confused with TITLE tag found in the header of the page, can be used to enhance just about any element of your page. When it used inside the img tag or a link, it provides an elegant effect when a user hovers with their mouse over the image or link. Try to hover with the cursor pointer (mouse) over the image below:
    This Is Image

Both title and alt attributes are considered as part of your page’s content by the search engines.

Nothing will demonstrate the proper better way of using alt and title attributes than actual examples.

Here is the first scenario. Many of the HTML editors and even Blogging platforms create an empty alt attribute. The image below is example of default setting of HTML editors or blogging platforms for adding pictures to your web page:


Here is the source code for the image above:

As you can see the alt attribute contains the name of the file and the title attribute does not exist at all. If you use images on your blog or website chances are that each file is named after the date and time when the picture was taken. This of course provides very little information as far as search engine bot is concerned.

Here is another example of the same picture but with enhanced alt and title attributes. Hover the mouse over the image to see the differnece:

Photo of The White House

And here is the source code for the above image:

Photo of The White House

The above image speaks not only to a human being but also to the search engine bots communicating important information about your image or picture through alt ad title attributes. The value of both attributes is considered to be part of the content of the page.

In real estate using these attributes can prove to be very effective from the SEO point of view. Especially when Google is concerned. Google uses the value of the attributes when the image search is performed.

Next time you write about a new listing or place a picture of a home on your blog, make sure to use effectively the alt and title attributes. If your blog uses WYSIWYG editor, it would be better to turn it off so you can modify the scour code of your images. This may take some time to get use to. But when you conquer it, I am most certain that no future image on your blog will appear without these attributes.

To rank well in the search engines, you must create unique content. No one other than the real estate agents are in position to provide truly unique content. {sarcasm}Unless of course a house is listed by two different brokers{/sarcasm}

Update: At the advise of fellow blogger and SEO expert, I am updating this post with a video by Google’s Matt Cutts talking about importance of enhancing your images with alt tag:



16 replies on “Make Your Images Understandable To Search Engines”

  1. This is very good advice! I have used these tags on my real estate site, and some of my images have ended up on the google image search. Any extra exposure for your site and listings is a big bonus.

  3. This is very good advice! I have used these tags on my real estate site, and some of my images have ended up on the google image search. Any extra exposure for your site and listings is a big bonus.

  4. Okay… While I am pretty good with technology I am relatively new to HTML, SEO, and on-line content. So I really appreciate this information.
    So… am I correct in my understanding that the only way to add ALT and TITLE is to manually insert it into the HTML source code?
    Thanks.

  5. Jim,

    Thanks for stopping by. There might be a way to do these things without working with code. Depending on the authoring software, you should be able to ad these attributes without looking at the code.

    If you write a blog, there many platforms including WordPress will allow you to ad ALT attribute. But I think it's much faster and easier to work with code rather than WYSIWYG interface. What do you use to create your pages?

  8. Okay… While I am pretty good with technology I am relatively new to HTML, SEO, and on-line content. So I really appreciate this information.
    So… am I correct in my understanding that the only way to add ALT and TITLE is to manually insert it into the HTML source code?
    Thanks.

    1. Jim,

      Thanks for stopping by. There might be a way to do these things without working with code. Depending on the authoring software, you should be able to ad these attributes without looking at the code.

      If you write a blog, there many platforms including WordPress will allow you to ad ALT attribute. But I think it’s much faster and easier to work with code rather than WYSIWYG interface. What do you use to create your pages?

  10. Very good information. And while your busy putting title tags on your images don't forget to include them on the rest of your links too. Title tags are often over looked and thus can give you a step up on your competition.

    Cheers
    Guy

  11. Very good information. And while your busy putting title tags on your images don’t forget to include them on the rest of your links too. Title tags are often over looked and thus can give you a step up on your competition.

    Cheers
    Guy

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