MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

Images are becoming an increasingly prevalent method to source visits to your website. Google’s Universal Search is one of the tools that make this possible. With a fair amount of images present in multimedia, including books, news articles and reviews, showing up in SERPs, will they replace traditional search results or simply supplement them?

Jack Menzel, director of the universal search program, says that Google has not yet made a decision on this and that only a limited number of Universal search results get shown. Susan Moskwa, also from Google, shared the sentiment. She says constant testing is being done on how to implement universal search results effectively and that we should “stay tuned”.

So, due to more organic search results, including more images, image optimisation takes on added importance. Guidelines for image optimisation include:
• Descriptive image names, preferably something related to the subject
• ALT attributes on your images
• Relevant text around your image
• An accurate description of your image in the form of keywords, and
• Ensure the pictures are of decent quality, as Google considers image quality as important.

So what exactly is an ALT attribute?
ALT attributes are used to describe the contents of an image or non-text element. Effectively, they are the text equivalent for the non-text elements that they represent. This is especially important for the visually impaired or for users who have turned off their image display on their web browsers. Google Webmaster Guidelines recommends them for developing a search engine friendly website. Googlebot cannot read embedded text in an image element, so the ALT attribute is the only way Google to get information about your image.

What’s the difference between good use and abuse?
There are no clear guidelines for optimising ALT attributes. However, there are some who suggest the following:
• The ALT attribute should be equivalent to the title when an image is used as a link
• If the image has lots of text, the ALT attribute text should be the same as the image’s embedded text
• An image must have an ALT attribute to match the keywords used, if it is going to be used for navigation
• Do not over-indulge the ALT attribute with many random keywords, instead use targeted keywords in a sentence, and
• When an image is used solely for design purposes, the ALT attribute should be empty.

So who can we trust?
With the importance of images on the incline, optimising images can have a marked effect on SERPs, especially with regard to content-poor pages that target the long tail searches. W3C says that the ALT attribute should do the same job that an image would, while Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say that the ALT attribute should describe the image file’s contents. So then, which is more important: the description or the function? Google might not be happy with long or non-relevant ALT attributes (SPAM). You also want to consider your users with special needs. The image type is another factor to be considered.

There is no simple answer to the question. In my opinion, you should use a little bit of common sense, while Google and W3C scream instructions at you from the sidelines. It is vital to not only take note of and use the guidelines effectively, but also to adapt them to suit your business and style. Guidelines are indeed only that. It’s how you use them that counts.