Search engine optimisation is not new, everybody who deals and wheels on the Internet knows about it. You have SEO journals, blogs, articles that tell you about the many ways optimisation is a critical part of your online marketing campaign. There is so much information about what to do and what not to do to get your website noticed. Everyone knows about the importance of high visibility in the search results pages and what it means for your business.

Yet many people are truly surprised when being told that each image they use on their website, blog, micro blog or any other place must be optimised. The reality is that without optimising each image you use, you lose valuable optimisation opportunities. The Internet is simply too competitive to neglect this chance. The problems start when you do not know the basics of image optimisation and what is legal and what will get you into deep trouble. There are three specific groups you must optimise images for to be successful.

Search engines cannot see pictures

Search engines can only read text, so for them to notice your images you need to use text in the form of keywords around your images as tags. Things to remember are that the best format for images to use is .jpg. To make the crawlers notice your images regularly, keep the images fresh. By regularly re-uploading your images, the crawlers then regard them as new images. Keeping images to a reasonable size is a good idea and balancing your images with the text on a page is important. Flooding a page with images is not a good optimisation idea.

Social media loves images

Social media is image hungry and this is a valuable optimisation tool to use. Again, the preferred format is jpg. It is important to remember that to get for instance Dig to offer you thumbnail submission you must have images that can be resized to the format they demand. This means resized to 160×120 or 160×160 pixels. It is very important to use crystal clear images when it comes to social media as blurry pictures will flop. In general though, larger images hold the attention of viewers much better than small images.

There are many sources where you can obtain images on the Internet. It is critically important to remember that many images have copy right and it is illegal for you to use those. Make very sure you will not run foul of the law when using images. No picture is worth damaging your online credibility, it takes too much effort to rebuild your reputation.

Your visitors are human

You must always focus on people when you optimise your images. When people land on your website, the first thing they look at will be the text. Your images though are what make them stay if the images are clear and relevant to your website or blog. Know the demographics of your web visitors; your images must appeal to gender, age group and location of visitors.

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