How To Setup Your Website/Blog: Lesson: SEO for Your Images

Images will enhance your website or blog in many ways, and not just visually. Handled properly, images can also get you SEO and ranking juice.
In this lesson I’ll show you where to get images if you don’t have your own source of them, where to store them and how to make the best use of them in your website.

Where to Get Free Images
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It’s easy enough to find images on the Internet, but the trouble is most images have a licence which prohibits them from being used without permission. You can get yourself into trouble if you just lift
images from other websites without permission to use them.
Here are two major places where you can get royalty-free images for your posts (though there are many more, these two are probably the best).

Flickr – Creative Commons
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Flickr is the largest image sharing site on the Internet and hundreds of new images are uploaded every minute. But, just because an image is on Flickr does’nt mean it’s free to use! Most in fact, are not. However, there is something called the Creative Commons licence that does allow you to freely use the images. (You can read the licence details here if you’re really interested: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/)

To find images under this licence go to the advanced search page: http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/

Type in your search criteria, but before hitting the search button scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the Creative Commons section. Tick the box marked “Only search within Creative
Commons licensed content”. You’ll also find check-boxes there to find images that you can use commercially (though Blogs are not usually considered commercial).

Here is an example of a nice image licensed under Creative Commons:

If you look at the right hand sidebar you will see some small symbols that denote the details of the licence. One thing that most CC images require is ‘attribution’ which means that when you use
the image you credit the author. The common way to do this is to simply insert a link that says “Photo: author name”, where the author name is the username of the Flickr user and the link points
to the photo page.

Using Flickr Images in Your Website
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The photo page in Flickr shows you a small version of the image, various tags that the author has used, the licence information, a description of the image and a comments section. To use the image
in your posts you want to get to the actual image itself – not this page.

Flickr automatically stores its images in multiple sizes. Just above the photo is a link called “All sizes” with an icon of a magnifying glass. Click this link to be taken to another page showing all of the available sizes. Click whichever size you want to use. Each one wll have a link above the picture saying “Download the size”. This link points directly to the image file and this is what you want to use in your blogging software.

If you are using WordPress (and you probably should be, and it’s what I recommend) when you insert an image it will ask you for the image URL – this is the URL to use.

Stock.Xchng Images
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Stock.Xchang is slightly different to Flickr – instead it is a collection of ‘stock photos’. These are images that are specifically designed to accompany some kind of marketing style material so they are often used in blogs, in business, commercial websites, etc.

Stock.xchang has millions of free images as well as premium images that must be paid for. You must register for the site to use it:

http://www.sxc.hu/signup

Once you have registered and logged in then you can search the images using keywords. The free images come first and the premium images are at the bottom.

Other Free Image Sites
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The two sites I’ve mentioned should contain more images than you would ever need but in case you can’t find what you are looking for there, you might like to try some of these which are all free:

FreeFoto – http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp
Photocase – http://www.photocase.de/en/
Stockvault – http://www.stockvault.net/
Open Photo – http://www.openphoto.net/

Hosting Your Own Images
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If you use an image from a site such as Flickr then you don’t need to worry about hosting the image because it’s already being hosted – you can ‘hotlink’ the image from where it is. Hotlinking is simply
linking to an image that is hosted on a server other than the one where it will be displayed. This is good for you because Flickr incurs the bandwidth cost for you.

If you have your own images that you have taken yourself then where do you host them? Two choices really – either on your own server or on an image host such as Flickr.

As a rule of thumb, I won’t host the majority of my images at Flickr: I could, knowing the images are safe (against a server crash and database corruption) and I can never lose them, plus there are SEO benefits. The trade off is website speed – it’s slightly faster to host images on my own website, and for me this is crucial, so I favour putting my images on my server so they load quicker.

To host my own images I simply create a directory called ‘images’ on my webserver and upload the images there. If you don’t know how to do this then simply use a site like Flickr to host all your
images and use the tips above to find the correct URL’s to use.

Optimise Your Images for the Search Engines
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There are two main factors that you need to consider – the image URL and the ALT tag.

The Image Filename
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If you use a site such as Flickr to host your images then you have no control over the filename – they have their own naming policy which does nothing to help your SEO efforts!

If instead you’re hosting images on your own website then the filename becomes part of the URL: For example, here is the image for the graphic for a free report that I use:

http://www.alwaysfullybooked.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/EBook3.png

On any page where I use this image the source of the page that it is on will have that URL embedded in it and Google sees this. If I were trying to rank for the keyword “vacation rental” I could choose to name my image in this way – you can too, and it helps, even if only a little.

The ALT Tag
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Before broadband came along images were often too slow to load – often people would surf with images turned off, and for a website with many images, this could seriously impact the user experience – so the HTML standards dictated that every image should have an ALT tag which is a text description of the image.

This is what will be displayed on the browser if images are turned off or if the image cannot be loaded for any reason. It is also a requirement for an HTML-compliant website. SEO wise, this ALT tag
is a great place to insert keywords because although nearly all of your visitors will never see them, Google will. What is great about ALT tags is that you can put any text you want in there.

Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t automatically put in the ALT tag for you when you insert an image into your post so you have to switch to the HTML view of your page and look at the source. You
will see something like this:

The actual code will vary a bit depending on what version of WordPress you are using but what you are looking
for here is:

alt=”"

The “” is just an empty string and it is between those two quotes that you should insert you keywords. So for that image I would insert “always fully booked”.

Using Your Own Images For Backlinks
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If you are hosting your images on a site such as Flickr rather than on your own site then you can use that image to gain a backlink back to your blog. Have another look at that image that I
showed you earlier:

Just underneath the image is a description and you can see that the author has made the first part of the description into a link to a blog post! Flickr allows you to put basic HTML into the description
of the images that you upload.

If you click that link you’ll see that it takes you to a nice post about blogging and of course the image is used there within the blog post.

Tagging Your Images
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Using that same image as an example, on the photo page look to the right of the page at the tags section. Notice how many tags the author has used here? They have used tags such as “blogging”,
“buddha” and other tags relevant to the image.

SEO For Images Recap
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Let’s quickly recap the parts that relate to good SEO practices for images:

- For images on your own server, put your keywords in the file name
- For images on Flickr, link to your blog in the description
- For images on Flickr, tag with your keywords
- For images in your posts – insert your keywords in your ALT tag