How do make your photograph’s Search Engine Optimization friendly on a static website?

What’s a static webpage?

Let’s be clear firstly about a few things. A static page in this instance is a html webpage. It’s not referring to WordPress, blogger or any blogging type of site.

Does everyone agree on these SEO methods?

The second this is that there are many people who say yes and no to somethings within the realm of SEO. And, yes and no to other things. In other words there’s no 100% the same method out there. However, there are some standards that even the search engines say you must do, and, a little more too.

List of SEO requirements for photographs

• Use both an “alt” tag attribute and a “title” tag attribute to describe the content.

These are two of the most important things you must do with your images. They tell the search engine, what your image is, and describes to the search engine what’s in the image.

What’s the difference between “title” text and “alt” text?

Title text tells the search engine about what’s in the image, the context of the photograph. It should be written just like any other sentence describing what is going on in the photograph. The text also shows up when you mouse-over an image, which can be a nice affect.

Alt text (Alternative text) is used if the image cannot be displayed for some reason. It should be short, and basically name the image.

• Make sure the image filename describes the content of the photo

I am not a huge believer in this, as I think search engines are smarter than that. That said, is certainly can do no harm.Use hyphens to separate the words describing the photograph in the filename

abedofroses or a-bed-of-roses or a_bed_of_roses? Again, I think search engines treat all of these files names the same. People however, will prefer to associate a name with hyphens in general.

• Place all photographs in a folder called “images”

Search engines crawl methodically. I think keeping all you photographs in one location makes sense for organizing yourself more than for SEO purposes. For that reason alone, I would keep them all in one folder. That folder can then have many sub folders.

How to write ALT and Title text for Photographs

Here is an example of the HTML source code of an optimized image of the “Taj Mahal” logo photo and how it appears on a web page:

< img src=”taj-mahal.jpg” border=”1″ alt=”taj mahal” title=”taj mahal in black and white ” width=”300″ height=”225″ >

In the next post in this series, we’ll cover Photograph SEO for WordPress