How can images improve your page ranking?

Images are one of the most important, and trickiest, elements of web design. They are necessary to aid consumer engagement and create visual interest across a page, but they are indexed in very different ways to text. Until recently, overusing images on a site could negatively impact on its ranking, taking away essential space for robot-attracting content; however, all this has changed with the advent of Google Images, which has given pictorial content a place in SEO.

While focusing on imagery will not help you to compete on keyword search rankings, it can give you a higher ranking on Google Images, a powerful engine capable of driving significant traffic to your site.

The image search works similarly to its text equivalent in that it does rely on keywords, taken from the title of the image file. For example, if you are looking to compete on the image keywords ‘cheap cars’ then all files on your site should be labelled appropriately – ‘Cheap cars _1.jpeg’ or similar. With a large site, this can be an onerous task by hand, so webmasters with many images may wish to use a batch file renaming programme.

Google has also confirmed that it places significant importance on the Alt text when trying to understand an image. Short for ‘alternative information’, the Alt text is displayed if an image fails to load and is usually a short description of the image, e.g. ‘Aston Martin DB9’. Unless these tags are right, an image is replaced by the default primary coloured shapes symbol, which provides no SEO currency.

Run in conjunction with a keyword optimised campaign, spending time ensuring your pictures attract the right kind of attention can lead to a substantial growth in internet traffic.