Article Marketing – How to Maximize SEO by Using Correct Image Titles and Tag

© 2009 Ugur Akinci

IMAGE Name and <Alt> Tag

The images you use in your articles (if any allowed) need to be optimized for the search engines as well since some people will bump into your article while doing an image search.
Images are captured by the search engines through their names and ALT tags.
The NAME is what you save your image on your system before uploading it into your article.
For example, if you are writing an article on chocolate pudding and want to include your own picture showing you cooking in your kitchen, don’t name the photo “Jeanette_W_Hattaway.jpg”, assuming your name is “Jeanette W. Hattaway.” Why? Because very few people will search the Internet images with the key phrase “Jeanette W. Hattaway.” However, a lot of people will search images with keywords “chocolate”, “pudding”, “dessert”, “gourmet cooking” etc. And those are exactly the people you’d like to attract to your article, correct?
Then just name your photo something like “chocolate_pudding.jpg” or “chocolate.jpg”, “dessert.jpg” etc. so that your photo has a chance to show up in the search results every time these keywords are searched for. Once your image shows up, all they need to do to go to your article (that includes the photo) is to click on the photo.
The same goes for the ALT tag, an image attribute in HTML which tells a browser what to display instead of an image on a web page if image display is not allowed, or for any reason the browser cannot display the image. If you do not assign an ALT tag to your photo, just a broken image icon will be displayed. But if you do assign an ALT tag then the text of the tag itself will be displayed.
Let’s say you’d like to assign “chocolate_pudding” as a tag text. This is how you would do it in your HTML editor:
<img src=”image.jpg (or .gif, etc.)” alt=”chocolate_pudding”/>
Some article marketing sites automatically prompt for the ALT text when you are uploading your image anyways. We’ll continue…