Search Engine Optimization for Images.
When you upload an image to your server you may not think of the consecuences that image can make. For example, when I first started this website I uploaded a picture of a car, days later I started getting Massive Traffic from Google Images, I had forgotten about the image and I was wondering why I was getting link backs from Google Images since I don’t have any images other that the images from my template, but those are blocked in my robots.txt and they are blocked to the public. Days after, I looked through the files in my server and there it was, a Rolls Royce phantom image that I had gotten from Google Images and I had edited and uploaded to my server.

The reason why I was getting a lot of traffic from that image was because Google bot had indexed my image and apparently I was in the first page of Rolls Royce, even though my site has nothing to do with cars. That’s because google uses the name of the image as a Keyword.

Image Name
When you want to optimize images, the best thing to do is to add the most relevant and most used keywords that people search for. If you have a Monkey image and you want to optimize it, then look at the image and see what the Monkey is doing or what is the background. For example if the Monkey is in a jungle, and has a banana in his hand you would use “jungle-monkey-banana.jpg” as a keyword, obviously that is not a set standard, as there are many other ways you could write that but that would be the name that I would use.

Don’t worry if you have a .jpg file or a .gif file as they do not matter, the only thing that matters is the name of the image and how relevant the keywords are with the Image. You wouldn’t name a monkey image “Apple” you’d name it “Monkey” , “Orangutan”, or “Chimp”.

Access to the Bots
When Optimizing your images, make sure you upload images to an Image folder in the root folder of your “Public_html” or on any other public folder, but make sure you give Googlebot full access to that folder by adding the folder in your robots.txt like so,

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /*

Note: You do not need to place images in an “Image folder” but it is recommended as it also keeps your files more organized.

Anchor Text
Another way to optimize images is to add a good anchor link when you are trying to link the image somewhere. If you are going to add an image of a monkey on your site and link it to www.thegermz.com the anchor text you would use should be “Monkeys at thegermz.com” or “Monkey at thegermz.com”, but always try to use an anchor that is relevant to the image.

As you may know from my previous articles, anchor text is also used as keywords for the websites that the anchor text links to, and it works the same way with the images. And like I said before, Always have relevant keywords!

Alt Text
Using Alt text is Very, Very important when you want to optimize an image. Alt text is used by search engines to index images and to add them to their vast directory of images.
Alt text is also very important because if a user has a slow connection such as Dial Up, as he may block images to optimize the speed of his slow connection, and when an image is blocked the only thing that shows up is the Alt text and it may help that user know what your website is about.
If you are still not convinced, then go to google and search for your site and look at Google Caches as you can see, Alt text may also show up when Google bot caches a website page.