Designing Your Web Site Images to be Search Engine Friendly!

Humans vs. Search Engines

Human visitors and search engine robots that visit websites and index information about them look for different things in a page. People like to see an attractive layout with nice graphics, easy-to-locate navigation, and friendly greetings like, "Welcome to Beth's Online Shop", at the top of a page. Search engines, on the other hand, like sites that have lots of textual content, good site structure (site maps, consistent linking style, certain table layouts, or the use of CSS to control the layout without tables), and a keyword-rich phrase such as "Chicago Area Florist" as the heading of a page, instead of a welcome message.

While search engines can read the "alt image" tags of graphics, they cannot "look at" pictures the way a human visitor can, and far prefer text. So they are basically blind to all your images unless you use a well constructed 'alt tag'.

Reasons and Methods to Replace Text with Images

One way to work around this paradox is to turn some of the text that search engines have no interest into graphics. For example friendly greetings like "Welcome to Our Site" or "Beth's Online Shop" work best as header graphics. This adds visual interest to your page without loosing any Search Engine ground.

Creating a non-search engine important page title as a graphic has the advantage of letting you design using fonts and graphics that cannot work in the HTML mode, where you are limited to a common set of fonts that will display on everyone's browser correctly. For example, if you use a fancy font in your text (not graphics) that is installed on your computer, but not on your visitor's, your page will look great to you when you view it in a browser, but when a visitor who does not have that font installed on their computer sees your site, their browser's ugly default font will be used and that eye candy effect of your site will disappear.

Another advantage of using a title graphic is that you can remove words irrelevant to your target keywords from your textual content. When search engine robots visit a site, they read pages from left to right, top to bottom. The first 20-25 words and last 20-25 words of your text content are especially important, and you want to make sure to include your target keywords within these sections. If at all possible, your primary target keyword phrase should be the very first text in your page. That is, if you are able to make a natural-sounding sentence beginning with it. If your page text begins with "Welcome to our site!", then you are pushing your keyword further away from the starting point of your text. So use graphics for those non-keyword titles to make sure that your first and last text words are what you need them to be for the Search Engines.

Well Constructed Text Headlines (Titles)

If using graphics or not, the first line of the main text on your page should be in heading format, with H1 tags.

Michigan Hotels

In html code it will look like this:

<h1>Michigan Hotels</h1>

and should contain your best target keyword phrase for that page. Using the Heading Tag gets you more points on the Search Engines than text in a regular paragraph format tag.

Reasons and Methods to Replace Images with text

Of course, the opposite might also be true of your current site. Right now, your keywords might be displayed as graphics rather than text. In this case, you should either repeat those keywords in text in a way that looks natural, or get rid of the graphics altogether and replace them with text. The important thing is that your target keyword appears as text, as close to the beginning of the page as possible, and within H1 tags.

Alt Image Tags

"Alt image" tags are short pieces of text that are associated with a graphic. If the graphic cannot be displayed for some reason, or if someone has set up their browser to block images, the text is shown instead. (The "alt" is short for "alternative".) Also, browsers designed for the sight impaired read out the text content of pages, and read the alt image tags as a way of describing a page. Here is what an image tag looks like in html code:

<img src="http://www.YourDomain.com/images/logo.gif" alt="Your
Keyword image" width="728" height="123">

The alt image tag is this part: alt="Your Keyword image"

You can type the alt image tags directly into the html code as above. However, most html editors, such as Dreamweaver, give you an easier way to add an alt tag, and you should check in your software's "Help" section to learn how to use their editing tools.

Since search engine robots are blind to the graphic itself, they read and index alt image tags. However, since this text is normally hidden from human visitors, it is especially susceptible to keyword spamming (i.e. entering a massive string of keywords that "hide" behind the picture). For this reason, search engines are giving less importance to alt image tags. They still are important though, and having the tags on your pages can give you a slight edge over competitor sites that don't have the tags. When adding alt image tags to your pages, keep the following points in mind:

- Don't go overboard. 4 or 5 words are plenty. Resist the temptation to pack in a long list of keywords because this could potentially get your site penalized by search engines or blacklisted from their directories.

- The alt image tag should include the primary target keyword of your site page content, and that can and should be different from page to page.

- The tag text should make sense if someone actually read it, and actually describe what is shown in the graphic. Please remember that folks with disabilities are many times NOT seeing your images at all, but just the text magnified many times, so make the alt tags keyword rich, but also readable by humans...let them know that the tag is for an image like this:

<img src="http://www.YourDomain.com/images/logo.gif" alt="Image: Picture of Homemade Candles and Potpourri, made by Beth. " width="728" height="123">

- Include "image," "photo," or "graphic" at the beginning of your short phrase. This prevents the search engines from flagging the tag as spam.

If you follow these search-engine-optimization principles when building your website you will end up with web pages that are easily classified and indexed by search engines. But then again it helps to submit your site to the Search Engines to speed up that process and there are some other things that you need to do to raise your standings in the Search Engines once you get there.so feel free to call us about Site Marketing.it is important to your success! 316-686-2284

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