Optimizing Website Images for Search Engines
ByAnother great place to embed keywords that your visitors don’t see but Google can, are in the image files of your website.
What files? For starters, the ones you directly upload from your digital camera, buy online or create from Photoshop. Every image has a file name. Most often, they are a registry number such as: 1220090034.jpg or some other identifier like that. After you save the image to your computer, and just before you upload the image to your website, right click on the image file and click on “rename.” You’ll have the opportunity to overwrite the long identifier number and rename the file with a keyword. Choose something relevant to your business such as publicspeaking2.jpg (if your business is teaching public speaking). Do thorough keyword research ahead of time to create a list of keywords to choose from and do this to every image on your website.
If you are using WordPress for your site, you have another opportunity to add even more keywords to an image. In your Media Library, select the image and click on “edit.” In the edit section, you can change the “title” to a keyword or entire keyword phrase such as “presentation skills.” Then save your edits. For the most part, your visitor will never see these keywords, but the search engines can. That’s because the search engines scan the source code for its information and these new image file names can be seen there.
Want to see what the search engines see? While viewing any webpage on the Internet, hold your mouse cursor in the middle of the page and right click. Then scroll down and select “View Source.” A window will open up that shows the ‘inside workings’ of your website: the design elements, code and programming that creates the page. You do not have to know what all that code means. Besides programmers, most people don’t. But the keywords that you have now embedded in the image files are there, able to be detected by Google. It’s one more place to take advantage of SEO, without blatant keyword stuffing in your website copy, which can hurt you.
Additional keyword hiding places revealed…
