Google On Using Images

Dec 15, 2006 at 9:01am ET by Barry Schwartz

Vanessa Fox at the Google Webmaster Central Blog posted tips on using images on your site. In short, she explains that:

(1) Don’t put the bulk of your visible text in images, use real text (2) Use alt tags to describe the images (3) Do not keyword stuff the alt tags (4) Alt tags are more important when your navigation is all images (5) A webmaster should be watchful of the “image-to-text ratio on your page” (6) Vanessa then pitched Google Sitemaps, with “Taking advantage of Image search”

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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ONE COMMENT ON Google On Using Images

feedthebot, December 15th, 2006 at 9:21 am ET:

Yes that quite a “pitch” but worded pretty cautiously.

“One thing that can help your images be returned for results in Google Image search is opting in to enhanced image search in webmaster tools”

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