Using Images to Your Advantage

For a few good, basic suggestions on how to best use images on your web site, see Vanessa Fox's post on the OGWC Blog.

Of course images on web sites help — and are often essential to — make them look nice. But search engines can't read them, even if they contain text. So Vanessa's suggestions include:

• make sure most of the text on your pages isn't in your images
• use descriptive "alt" attributes for your images to tell search engines what they are and also for people who have images turned off (they help the visually impaired)
• at the same time, don't go overboard loading your images with keywords

Vanessa's post also talks a bit about Google's image search and how to make it work for you.