Lisa Lambert

Just today I had a co-worker asking me some questions about Google Images. He just wanted to understand Google Images better. This lead to a conversation about ALT Tags, Google ruling the world, etc. I could talk about this stuff all day, but I won't bore you with a lot of details.

Google Images is a popular service for searching images. Easy, right? So why am I telling you this? Well I'm telling you about Google Images simply because you can gain some significant traffic when you use images in your site properly. Getting Google Images to index your images could potentially get you the desired traffic, especially because Google recently began to show their image results at the top of their regular organic listings.

So now you're saying, "Wait a minute Lisa! I need to know if I'm doing this correctly." You can use ALT Image Tags to make sure that search engines (i.e. Google) know what your image is exactly. Search engines can't read pictures yet, so you have to tell them explicitly what your images are about. If you use images, you should use ALT Image Tags. An ALT Image Tag is located within an [ IMG ] tag (replace [ ] with < >) and is a brief description of the image. It is simply a textual replacement for an image. Take the time to write a unique and relevant description of the image. Abuse of these tags can lead to a rankings penalty, so be careful when writing your descriptions. Do not repeat the same words over and over again, and never repeat the same ALT Image Tag more than once unless the image itself is repeated.

I hope that gives you a little more clarity on Google Images and why you should use ALT Image Tags. This could be valuable for your site traffic.

If you have any other questions, please send me an email or post a comment here.

Cheers Everyone!