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Using Images for SEO
By John Case (c) 2006

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 pictures
and graphics, animation, easy-to-locate navigation, and friendly
greetings like "Welcome to Annie'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 (sitemaps,
consistent linking style), and a meaningful phrase such as
"Chicago Area Florist" as the heading of a page. 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.

Replacing Text with Images

One way to work around this paradox is to shift some of the text
that search engines have no interest in over to graphics. For
example friendly greetings like "Welcome to Our Site" or
"Annie's Online Shop" work best as header graphics.

Creating a header graphic in a graphic editing program like
Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks has the advantage of
letting you know exactly what that part of your site will look
like to visitors. If you create a header or navigation bar with
text, you are limited to a common set of fonts. If you use a
fancy font that is installed on your computer, your page will
look great to you, but when a visitor who does not have that
font on their computer visits your site, their browser's default
font will be used and that nice aspect of your site will
disappear. By making your header or navigation button images,
you are free to use any of the fonts on your computer, and can
be sure they will display the same way to your visitors.

Another advantage of using a header 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 begins with "Welcome to
our site!", then you are pushing your keyword further away from
the starting point of your text.

The first line of the main text on your page should be in
heading format, with H1 tags (In html code it will look like
this: <h1>London Hotels</h1>), and should contain your target
keyword. However, you may want to add a greeting above the
heading ("Welcome to Our Site!" for example). Since this is a
very general phrase, with no relevance to any target keyword,
it is best to make this a graphic.

If your site already has a greeting such as "Welcome to Our
Site" in text at the top of your main page, it is relatively
easy to convert this to a graphic, as follows.

- Open your page in an internet browser.

- Push the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard.

- Open a photo editing program, such as Photoshop.

- Create a new document and select Edit>Paste or Ctrl+V on your
  keyboard. The screenshot will be pasted on the blank document.

- Crop the image down to just the word or phrase you would like
 to replace, with only a little blank space around the edges.

- Choose "Save as" or "Save for Web", saving the file in the
 "Images" folder of your site.

- In your site editor, such as Dreamweaver, simply open your
  page, delete that text, and drag and drop in the image you
  created. Save and upload your page.

Replacing Images with Text

Of course, the opposite might also be true of your current site.
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.
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.

Search engine robots do 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.

- The tag text should make sense if someone actually read it,
  and actually describe what is shown in the graphic.

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

Using these techniques to organize the graphics on your site
will give you a slight edge over the competition in the search
engines.
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John Case is the author of http://www.easy-learn-to-earn.com, a
free guide to making an income online, and maintains an SEO site
at http://www.awordsworth1000pictures.com/SEO_training/index.html
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