A picture may be worth a thousand words...but unless you're optimizing those words for search engines, chances are those thousand words will be lost in translation.

Here's something some of you might know, and here's something that will shock some others: Search Engines can NOT see images. That's right. You could populate your site with images rivaling the beauty of an original Monet masterpiece, and search engines won't see a damn thing.

So how do we get our images noticed by search engine crawlers? We treat them like elementary students, of course. We lay out everything they need to know in clear directions. Here's how:

ALT tag

The Alt attribute is short for alternate text.  On the front-end of a site, if the image cannot be displayed, the alternative text attribute will display instead. In this case, if there is an error or a certain setting (e-mail spam detector, etc), your readers will still have an idea about what the image is about.

However, the alt attribute is also very useful for search engines because unlike the images, themselves, search engines not only read these attributes - they prioritize them. Therefore, you should craft an alt tag that includes the keyword or keyword phrase you are optimizing for the rest of the specific page.

File Name

Be thoughtful when you are saving an image to a specific folder. A simple "img001.png" or "img001.jpg"  may be fine for successful organization of your own files, but it is not enough for search engines. Instead, try a more descriptive file name to help explain exactly what the image is to search engine crawlers. For example, if our image is an infographic regarding the SEO of images, we could save the file as "Image-SEO-Infographic.png".

Note: It is best to separate words using a hyphen as opposed to an underscore or other symbols.  Search Engines know to treat the words separated with hyphens as individual words. That is not the case with other symbols.

IMG Size

The most efficient way to literally throw out every ounce of image optimizing effort is to upload a giant picture to your site. Search engines are picky.  They don't like large images, and if a massive image file is weighing down the loading time of your site, they will dock you for it. Make sure your high quality image files (which carry a greater weight) have a balanced quality and file size.

Optimizing images on your website is crucial to your overall SEO strength. For more information of a fully integrated SEO and Internet marketing campaign, click here.

One last thing before you run off to optimize your site's images! Blue Archer has just launched their brand new Facebook page! Help us regain our following on our new page: Blue Archer Facebook. We promise we'll respond with some social media loving and liking of our own!