Images are probably the least important part of SEO for your site.  That said, SEO for images is simple.  It consists of the following:

1. Use brief, descriptive file names.
2. Use brief, descriptive alt text.

In order to run a successful online business you will need to be organized.  Being organized means using meaningful file names.  So when you name your image files use brief, descriptive file names like “Prince-Speedport-Red-Tennis-Racquet.jpg”.  When you include the image in your pages you should use similar alt text.  It’s really just that simple.

Avoid the following image mistakes

Some of these mistakes are SEO mistakes, some are just plain bad practice.

1. Do not use generic filenames like “image1.jpg”, “pic.gif”, “1.jpg” – it gets too hard to track over time and you will likely overwrite one of these files or call the wrong one for your page at some point as your site gets larger
2. Do not use lengthy file names – these become a pain over time, they are easy to mistype/misspell, and for SEO purposes remember that Google compares the amount of code on the page to the amount of content with a preference towards sites with more content and less code
3. Do not think of alt text as a place to keyword stuff – Google doesn’t reward keyword stuffing and neither do your users
4. Do not use long sentences for image alt text – again Google doesn’t reward this, it’s easier to have the wrong alt text, and user don’t want to see 150 words when the image doesn’t show up
5. Do not use only image links for your site’s navigation – alt text is not the equivalent of anchor text and it won’t have the same positive effects of categorizing your content for Google

Non-SEO Tips for Images

There are SEO tips and there are just plain good practice tips.  The following tips have nothing to do with SEO they are just meant to help make your life easier.

Keep all of your images in a single directory

If all of your images are in one place on your site the remembering where they are isn’t a problem.  At some point you may get a better picture and you want to replace “Prince-Speedport-Red-Tennis-Racquet.jpg”.  If every page references the same picture in this one directory then you know that when you replace the original “Prince-Speedport-Red-Tennis-Racquet.jpg” image every page on your site will be immediately updated.  No reason to make you life any harder by scattering pictures all over your site.

This doesn’t mean that you should have subdirectories.  I recommend the use of subdirectories based on topic.  In this case if you just had one picture per tennis racquet then it makes sense to have a subdirectory for Prince, Head, Wilson, Babolat, etc.  One subdirectory per manufacturer.  However, if you had several pictures per racquet then under the Prince subdirectory you could have a SpeedPort Red subdirectory where all of your images for the Prince Speedport Red Tennis Racquet would reside.

Store all of your images in commonly supported formats

Almost every browser supports the following formats:

• JPG
• GIF
• PNG
• BMP

There is rarely any reason to have your images in any other format.  Some highly technical graphics sites may want other file formats but they take the risk that the general user will have browser that can’t render the image.  If you users can’t see the image what’s the point of having one there?

The BMP format has little if any compression in it so your images are large and can take a long time to load.  Google considers page load times for SEO purposes and for PPC Quality Score purposes.  In both cases the shorter the load time the better so I recommend using BMP only when absolutely necessary and that is pretty rare.  The formats with compression will show up just as well on most browsers so use one of them.  My personal favorite is PNG.