Is A Picture Worth A Thousand Words?
The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words may be true in many respects, but in terms of SEO or search engine marketing it rarely holds value. Website visitors will certainly appreciate a useful and relevant image in order to highlight a point, and often images can be used to give an otherwise dull website a bit of a lift. However, even though search engines have become more adapt at learning to “read”, index, and even rank images they are rarely as beneficial as the text based content that appears on your pages.
How Spiders Crawl
Search engine spiders crawl the Internet, travelling from page to page via the use of links. As they arrive on a web page they index the contents according to the content, paying specific attention to the existence and use of keywords. While it's true that they consider the use of keywords in image paths and even in the titles and descriptions of images, they aren't able to determine what exactly is included in the image. Without the proper use of HTML tags, therefore, the spiders have little idea of what the image represents or presents to the visitor.
Effective SEO
Effective SEO concentrates on providing search engine spiders with what they need and that means offering them useful content that they can index. In turn, this means that the search engines can then apply their findings to numerous algorithms in order to determine how well a web page ranks in the search results. Better on page content combined with a powerful link profile leads to better SEO results. From the eyes of the avid SEO professional, then, images have very little value in getting a page ranked in the search engines. However, image search does mean that some SEO value is now afforded to images.
Image Search
Google and other search engines offer specific image search to their users. Surfers can log onto the home page of the search engine and by clicking the Images tab or link they can search for images related to the keywords they use. The search engines will then search their index for those pictures that have been indexed with the appropriate keywords applied to them. The keywords used, in this case, are those that are found in the image path, the image title, and potentially the image description but, again, the search engines will have considered the use of keywords in the main content surrounding the image.
The Use Of Images In SEO
Images hold very little SEO value for ranking an entire web page but they can be ranked in the Image search results that the engines now offer. Ranking images in this way is even less of a precise science at the moment than general page SEO. It's also important to draw a line under SEO at some point because the content you offer, be it textual or image based, should also prove appealing to your human website visitors; they, after all, are the ones that turn you a profit or otherwise.
