Underground Web Designs Blog

Every site uses images, after all “a picture speaks a thousand words” right? Well, now it may bring a thousand visitors as well. Rosanne from net business blog writes: 

until recently, the images found on your page played no role in search engine optimization. However, this is no longer true.

Farther along in her article Rosanne points to several stats that show that more and more searchers are searching for images, or using Google’s “universal search”, which turns up everything from web pages to images to weather reports. With such an increase in search beyond text it is becoming increasingly important to optimize your images for the search engines. But how?

Rosanne offers some tips in her article:

1. Use some keywords that relate to your image in the image’s filename.
2. Use some keywords in the alt tags of the image as well.
3. Make sure the text near the image contains the same keywords. This gives the keywords in the image filename and alt tags more credibility.

If you aren’t optimizing your images for the search engines, you’re missing out on potential traffic, plain and simple. With this thought comes a serious revelation. How well are your optimizing the rest of your site’s content? Are you doing all you can to optimize the videos, flash content, and even RSS feeds on your site? If search engines are now taking images into account, maybe they’ll soon be looking more closely at other kinds of content as well.

Something to think about.

SEO has become a monster.

For those of you who haven’t thought about it recently, SEO stands for Search Engine OPTIMIZATION. The “O” being the key letter. SEO does not stand for search engine ranking, or search engine traffic. It does not mean getting lots of links or putting a site on lots of social networks. At it’s core, SEO is simply optimizing a site so that search engines can easily and efficiently crawl it.

Instead of this simple definition, time and again you will hear SEO “experts” talking about this or that linking strategy, or the latest and greatest software to submit your site to all the major search engines and directories. How does any of this fit into optimizing a site for search? Really, it doesn’t… more often than not it has to do with gaming the system.

SEO is misplaced. I truly believe that if a webmaster does his best to make his website open and available to people, he will naturally be ranked high in the search engines. Remember, search engines do not exist to bring you traffic. They exist to bring searchers to relevant sites.

If you design your site and marketing strategy to attract people, no doubt you will soon find you’re attracting search engines as well. Asking (or buying) a link on a popular blog will not only get you visitors directly, it will bring with it Google page rank. Similarly, writing quality blog posts or powerful content on your website will naturally result in Stumbles, Diggs, and other social networking attention.

In Short: attract the people, and the robots will follow. Remember, people design robots, not the other way around.