Question:

I recently attended a few internet marketing seminars and discovered the importance of making my blog key phrase rich. However, I run an amateur photography blog and so my blog contains a number of photographs. My question is should I be using these images for optimization purposes and if so, how?

Laura, Belfast

That’s a great question, Laura, and one that few people think to ask. In short the answer is yes, you should definitely make sure that you’re optimizing images on your website.

However, one proviso to my “yes” is that, from the point of view of SEO, this should not take priority over getting your texts on that page and the meta tags for that page key phrase rich first.

To start with, make sure that you’ve correctly filled in the alt tags for each image. An alt-tag allows you to add descriptive content and information about the image, and at the least you should be able to fit one or two key phrases into this description. However, you’ll need to ensure that this image is surrounded with relevant text and used in context. One rule of writing key phrase rich alt-tags for your blog is to imagine that your readers’ browsers disable images, therefore you need to include a detailed paragraph of the image that should be pictured below.

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