Pictures Tell a Thousand Words But Search Engines Cant “See” them

Everyday, I come across websites loaded with images making the website look great. Bright colors and photos quickly draw visitors’ attention as they skim the text and jump to the images.  In some instances I come across a site that uses a fancy font that is likely not installed on every web users machine. To overcome this they have turned the text into an image too. While these practices may make the site visually appealing and they “tell a thousand words”, search engines cannot “see” them. Or should I say, see them very well.

Why Can’t Search Engines See My Photo-Filled Site?

The main factors search engines use for determining search rankings, is to read site text and coding to learn what the site is about. Since the search engine spiders/crawlers (or whatever you want to call them) aren’t human, they cant see a picture of a house, for example, and record that the site is about houses. It will see the picture and likely move on.

If you have text converted to images so you can use a special font or another reason, this is a big SEO no no. You should make the change right away to use a more generic font, and replace the image text with real text. The sacrifice of the fancy font will be more than outweighed by the increased SEO visibility. Think of it this way, what is the point in using a stylish font style on your site if nobody can find it?

I Still Want Images on My Site, What Are My Options?

Images aren’t completely invisible to search engines, there are certain “tags” that can be coded and associated with your images so that you can tell search engines what the images are. The Google Images search feature uses these for example. Although, this alone is not enough in itself to maximize your visibility.

Follow these steps to bring your image loaded site into SEO compliance:

1. Remove any text imagery and replace it with properly coded html text
2. Reduce the amount of images on your site or at least reduce their size
3. Add html text to page in the areas where the images have been reduced or removed that talk about the image or content relevant to your site
4. Use appropriate tags (see below) to code your image placement so that search engines can read them. Remember to use descriptive keywords and phrases relative to your company

Which Image Tags Are Important For SEO?

Alt tag: This tag appears when your mouse rolls over an image. It also replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken

Title tag: This tag text replaces the image area if the link to the image file becomes broken. Although similar in nature to the “Alt tag” both of these tags should be used. When this is the case, the Title tag will override the Alt tag for a broken image. The good thing is that search engines pay attention to both the Title and Alt tags.

File name: Avoid using a generic file name like image1.jpg, instead, for SEO advantages, name your file with a keyword or phrase related to your field.

Now you know what to do to have a “pretty” site while keeping it relatively optimized for search engine visibility. Go for it and start making some changes. Let me know if I can help in any way!