Most search engines find it too computationally expensive to read pictures. Acknowledging this problem, Google went so far as to launch a contest which pairs contestants against each other to describe pictures.
The easiest way to make your images visible to search engines is to help describe them. You can:
- Use a filename that describes the image
- Use hyphens to separate words in the image name eg, my-name.jpg
- Use a descriptive image alt attribute to describe the image
- Make the alt attribute 2-5 words long including words related to the pages core words. (So not a long list of keywords separated by commas.)
- Use a descriptive image title to describe the image.
- Generally less important than the alt attribute, the image title can be a bit longer and read like a sentence.
Each of these methods helps search engines better understand what the image is about.
Web pages are created out of hypertext markup language (HTML). Here is an HTML source code view of what a descriptive image presentation may look like for a picture of a navel orange:
<img src =”navel-orange.jpg” alt=”Picture of a navel orange” Title=”Picture of a delicious navel orange.” Height=”200” width=”300” /”>