In a recent post, I discussed basic Search Engine Optimization for Product Pages and wanted to follow up with SEO for images.

As discussed in the previous blog on Product Page SEO, image descriptions are one of the most important factors when dealing with SEO in the Big Commerce platform.  What I didn’t discuss are some of the other nuances about images and some of the things you can do to make them appear more relevant to your site, niche and locality.

Image File Name:

Many website owners fail to recognize the opportunity lost with a well thought out file name and image description.  At left is a screenshot of the Google Text Cache for a popular florists wedding page.  You can see that the file names are quite random in nature and don’t really describe the photo in any way.  By adding some more descriptive text to the image filenames, we can further develop the relationship with the search engines, and let them know even more what our site is about using these keywords.

What’s more descriptive, “image007.jpg” or “Amanda-Wedding-flowers.jpg? As a good rule of thumb, you should always change the filenames for any images you post to your site.

When adding images to the pages of your site, you’ll see the image editor below.  The appearance tab allows us to change a few things, including the size of the image displayed, how it is aligned in on the page, what amount of white space surrounds the image, border or none, and it gives us the opportunity to specify a description and a title.

You can see that I’ve added an image called “Amanda’s Wedding Flowers” to a wedding page, and given it a keyword rich description that includes a few of the target keywords for the page itself.   Wedding, Flowers, City name.  There are lots of different text variables you can use in your image descriptions and file names.

Text Variables to use when optimizing your images:

• City (Las Vegas)
• Venue (The Elvis Wedding Chapel, Caesars Palace)
• Type of Bouquet (Calla Lilies, Gerbera Daises etc)
• Colors (…)
• Event Date
• Style of the Event (Contemporary, Modern, Victorian etc.)

Just don’t overdo it.   Don’t make your descriptions or file names too long, just include relevant information about the image itself and you’ll be just fine.

Update:  For more advanced users, you might want to try Geocoding your images which you can find out more about here.

Update#2:  Check out this great article on SEO for Images.