Images, graphics and thumbnails play an important role in the overall look and feel of your website. They can greatly improve the usefulness of your site; making it more user-friendly and easier to navigate. More importantly, the visual images on your site can be optimized to improve your search engine rankings.

Despite their importance, many webmasters ignore images or graphics when it comes to optimizing their web pages. Don't make the same mistake.

There are some simple rules to follow when using SEO with your onsite graphics. Here are a few tips:

First, you must know exactly what an 'Alt Image Tag' is in order to optimize for the search engines. You must also realize search engine robots can't see your images, they can only read text - the text in your Alt Image Tags. So you have to construct your Alt Image Tags with this factor in mind and feed these robots with your popular keywords. Search engine robots usually spider popular sites every day or so.

What is an Alt Image Tag?

Every image, graphic or thumbnail on your site will have html code similar to this:

<[sample code] img src="http://www.YourDomain.com/images/logo.jpg" Alt="Your Keyword Image" width="600" height="200" [sample code]>

Your Alt Image Tag will be:

alt="Your Keyword Image"

Always include an Alt Image Tag description for all your images, graphics and thumbnails. This includes all headers, background images and even thumbnails of other sites, if you use them. Keep your descriptions of the images short and related to the image itself. It would be a good idea to end each description with the word photo, image or graphic.

Many marketers like to include their main keyword or keyword phrase they are targeting in the Alt Image Tag. They also place this keyword phrase in the text on their page, in the title tag, meta description and many alert marketers also place their keyword phrase in the URL of that page. You should also include your keyword phrase in the last 25 words on the same page.

Feed the spiders but be careful!

DON'T repeat the same keyword or keyword phrase numerous time on your page in the image tags - this may be seen as keyword spamming by the robots.

Using plurals and variations of your keyword is fine, such as: faxing service, fax services, efax services.

Many marketers also use misspelled keywords in the Alt Image Tag as it can only be seen when the image is scrolled over. Spiders can't spell but they will index these misspelled keywords and bring in extra traffic!

Graphics

The ordinary website will have more than just photos or images on a webpage. You will have headers, backgrounds, liners, etc. all of these should also have Alt Image Tags. Although in this age of the broadband Internet, your page loading time is not a major factor as it once was, but you should still reduce all your images so that they will download quickly.

Many professional web designers place unneeded or useless keywords (ones that get no searches) in the graphics on their site. For example, instead of placing 'Welcome to our site' in a headline - place it in a graphic at the top of your page. This will free up your headline for your main keywords.

Placing these useless words in a graphic where the robots can't read them - frees up your Alt Tags for keywords that you're promoting. Place your main keywords in the headline for better SEO. Keep feeding those spiders!

But always keep in mind, you are creating your content or web pages for real live human beings so you should check to see what your site's graphics look like in the different browsers. Try here: www.anybrowser.com

Since we have an ever increasing numbers of different screen or display sizes, always check to see how your graphics look on a different size display. You might be horrified to find your perfectly designed page on a 15" PC is totally distorted on a 17" widescreen laptop.

Needless to say, for site consistency, keep all your background images and logos the same throughout your site. Same goes for your fonts and text size, it will keep your site's visitors more focused and on track.

Thumbnails

Many online sites use thumbnails to raise the professional quality of their sites. It makes for a higher standard of design, not to mention, it will increase the usability of your site. It will also increase your click thru rates.

Thumbnails are screen capture shots of a website. They give the surfer some idea of what a site looks like before they visit that site. In a billion site Internet, this can be very important for the promotion of your site.

Using thumbnails will increase the visibility of your site and make it stand out from the crowd. Many professional sites like AOL, Network Solutions, and ALexa use thumbnails. Any site can use thumbnails, check the resource box at the end of this article for further directions on how to place thumbnails on your own site or sites.

Conclusion

Using images, graphics and thumbnails to promote your site can be easily done if you use the advice given above. Always remember to use Alt Image Tags to position your selected keywords or keywords in the search engines. Consistently do this over a long period of time and you will see your site rise in the rankings. Keep those spiders well fed and happy!

More importantly, using these visual aids will also improve the friendliness and usability of your site. It will help raise the professional look and feel of your site so that other webmasters and sites will want to link to your site; further increasing your rankings and the popularity of your site.

Don't underestimate the power of a simple image - it can do wonders for your site.

Copyright (c) 2006 Titus Hoskins