Have you every gone to Google image search looking for a quick photo, image or wine label? Image search is an area often overlooked when first dipping your toes into the world of search engine marketing.

Remember, search engine bots are a series of algorithms and routines that determine ranking and image search engines are no different. But, you can’t expect a bot to be as perceptive as a human and identify what your keywords your wine images should relate to.

So, give them a hand. Effectively labeling your wine (or any) images and alt tags is a great start. But, do so within reason. A few months ago we posted about the abuse of search engines by black hat developers who used ‘keyword stuffing’ on their meta tags to lessen the relevance of certain determination factors such as meta tags - and it too has been done in image tagging. This shouldn’t thwart you from using images as an effective means of SEO however - but do so within reason and without keyword spamming.

Properties to understand about images.

Naming: When saving or selecting a filename for your image, be sure to use something which is relevant not only to the image description, but the overall keyword theme for your specific site or page.

Do’s: Separate words with hyphens. Search engines cannot decipher where one word begins and another ends without an identifiable delimiter such as a hyphen (-).

Example: wine-marketer-logo.jpg not winemarketerlogo.jpg.

Don’t: Separate words with spaces or underscores when a hyphen will do.

Example: wine marketer.jpg will conver to wine%20marketer.jpg.

Alt Tags: Alt tags allow you to provide a description of your image to visitors and search engines for multiple purposes. First, the alt tag will show prior to an image being displayed should it take a few seconds to load and will give visitors a description of what is loading (or even maybe pointing to a bad link). Second, they provide a hover over effect on the image, allowing visitors to see a description of images they place their cursor on. Third, they display an image description for browsers or users who are unable to load your site images including those visually impaired. Lastly, and most importantly for this article, they provide a description to search engines of what this image is about. Pairing this with the selective keywords on your site and image filename, it is another opportunity to reinforce your search engine worthiness!

Here is an example of SEO friendly image naming and alt tag in HTML format:

Remember to use alt tags whenever possible as another form of traffic allocation through image search and in helping boost your organic search results by providing even more keyword relevancy for your site.

Suprisingly Wine.com adheres to alt tag standards however does not relate this into the their image filenames. All the little things make a difference in SEO!

Cheers!

Mark Spangler