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Image Optimization : Make Use of Your File Attributes
Friday, June 22, 2007
As well as the HTML attributes used in your mark-up code, you can also use several properties of the actual file itself for your SEO needs. On a page displaying lots of images, each image should of course be fairly small and optimized for viewing across the Internet, but each of these images should be thumbnails that link to a larger, full size image, on a page of its own if necessary. Bigger image files are seen as more important and tend to do better in image focused searches.
Linking to a full-size image also has the benefit of providing us with a link tag that can be optimized as well, giving us another opportunity for keyword placement. So the size of the image is one property, or attribute, that can be turned to our advantage and the link to the larger image is another.
The obvious choice of file attributes that we have control over is the filename. Some people choose to match the filename with the alt attribute. While there is no reason not to do this, unless your alternative text is more than a couple of words, you have to remember that the filename is not used in any way for accessibility and is therefore fair game for some keyword placement. This will be reflected in your HTML code in the SRC of the image tag, thereby being visible to bots and crawlers.
Remember to always give images meaningful names, so avoid "image1.png" at all costs. Also, don't use spaces in an image name at all; use a hyphen instead, which most search engines will interpret as a logical space.
The last important attribute of the image file to think about is the file extension, which denotes the format of the image file. For web images this is likely to be either .jpg, .gif or .png. For relevancy, always ensure you use an appropriate format for the image you're displaying; so for photographs use jpg and for logos, line drawings or other non-photographic imagery stick with gif or png. This isn't as important for SEO but is definitely a current best practice.
Linking to a full-size image also has the benefit of providing us with a link tag that can be optimized as well, giving us another opportunity for keyword placement. So the size of the image is one property, or attribute, that can be turned to our advantage and the link to the larger image is another.
The obvious choice of file attributes that we have control over is the filename. Some people choose to match the filename with the alt attribute. While there is no reason not to do this, unless your alternative text is more than a couple of words, you have to remember that the filename is not used in any way for accessibility and is therefore fair game for some keyword placement. This will be reflected in your HTML code in the SRC of the image tag, thereby being visible to bots and crawlers.
Remember to always give images meaningful names, so avoid "image1.png" at all costs. Also, don't use spaces in an image name at all; use a hyphen instead, which most search engines will interpret as a logical space.
The last important attribute of the image file to think about is the file extension, which denotes the format of the image file. For web images this is likely to be either .jpg, .gif or .png. For relevancy, always ensure you use an appropriate format for the image you're displaying; so for photographs use jpg and for logos, line drawings or other non-photographic imagery stick with gif or png. This isn't as important for SEO but is definitely a current best practice.
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