Naming your images can help in search results

Moths in FranceTHERE are a couple of things you can do to make it easier for search spiders to find your images, but more importantly tell what the actual photograph is about.

The first thing to do is to change the default name your camera provides once you have downloaded your image to your computer, often it is something like ‘dsc00887.jpg’ which doesn’t tell us a great deal.

So after you have edited your image save the new one with a more descriptive name, something like ‘rose-garden-bergerac.jpg’ as you can see this both describes the pic and offers up a location.

You’ll see that I also split the words up with a ‘dash’ again this lets search engines read what the pic is all about.

Images also have alt tags, they look like this: alt=“Rose garden” and you will see them when an image does not load properly.

The other tag connected with images is called the title tag, but it does not feature within the image properties on the network, but it is the one you see when you hover your mouse over a pic.

Again search engines use these to understand what an image is about, so if you wanted more locally based searches to prove popular your alt tag could read:

alt="Rose garden Bergerac"

In fact I recently crossed a very useful article from Google themselves on improving your site for search engines, as well as the use of alt tags in images, take a few minutes to check out the video below:





Unfortunately the Ning service doesn't complete the alt tag automatically when you add an image to an article, it could use the image name for example, hopefully in time this will be the case.



In the mean time you can do it yourself, so once you've uploaded your image there will be a line of code and you will see, alt="" click between the quote marks and add a few words of descriptive text.



Don't stuff the alt tag full of words that have no relation to the image trying to trick the search engines, it won't work, all you need is a short phrase and maybe a location.



In the end though if you have taken a little time to write an interesting article or a helpful paragraph or two describing your image, this will help both search engines track you down but more importantly entertain and inform your readers.