There are two things most people dream about in regards to their new website … having it look fabulous and getting lots of people visiting it. Problem is, sometimes our pursuit of having it look fabulous can actually hinder our effort to get lots of traffic. We all want beautiful websites with lots of pretty graphics but there is a problem with that. While we can look at the image below and know that’s a photo of porn star Eva Angelina, but that’s because we are human’s.
Computers aren’t as smart. They can’t “look” at a picture like we can. They can read the text on a page and try and figure out what your website is about, but if your website has a bunch of photos and not enough graphics, then how can they understand? Because again don’t forget computers (like the robots that index your sites for search engines look Google) can’t look at a picture and know unless you tell it.
So what I’m saying is, you need text and lots of it for search engines to understand what your website is about. But if you are smart about it, there are some things you can do to be able to use some graphics, if that is, you do it in a certain way.
First is the file name.
Have you ever downloaded a picture from Facebook and noticed the long, odd name? ie: 1514336_594029313994636_421512611_n.jpg
How would a search engine know what that photo was about if you named your picture that? So instead why not name it something like Eva_Angelina.jpg? Now when you look at the picture you know it looks like Eva Angelina and Google can read the file name Eva_Angelina.jpg and go oh hmm this must be a picture of Eva Angelina.
Next you want to always give your images an alt description.
Every image you have on your website needs an ALT=””. Far to often we get lazy and don’t fill that out. Here is an example <img alt=”Eva Angelina” src=”http://www.kelli.net/Eva_Angelina.jpg” />. Notice how it says alt=”Eva Angelina”? That tells every computer and TTS (text to speech) reader that this is an image of Eva Angelina. It’s vital that you properly tag every single image on your website. Have you done this?