A famous phrase that most would recognize. However, to a search engine is an image worth a thousand words?

Images allow us to spice up a website by providing something other than text for humans to look at, making the page that much more attractive. However, from a search engines perspective all it will see is a line of code similar to this:

<img src=”./img/01.jpg alt=”” height=”100” width=”100”>

Now that in itself doesn’t really mean much of anything, so how is a search engine supposed to utilize an image to present content to a user.

There are many ways to optimize your images for search engine visibility, and provide almost hidden keywords that aren’t visible to the average user by utilizing things like the ALT attribute or TITLE tag. These provide not only an area for descriptive text to be put in, but even more valuable keywords that can be associated with a page.

Another way to better serve images to a search engine is by means of compression and size considerations. Larger and slower loading images reduce the response time of your website. For a user running a highspeed Bell Fibe Internet line, this usually isn’t overly noticeable, however a user siting in a park on their mobile phone, will notice the long wait time, and more importantly burn through a chunk of their monthly data allowance.

Modern search engines take into consideration the load time of a page when they are indexing because the people who drive the backend scripts of the engines recognize that speed matters. Slow sites will always loose to a fast and efficient site.

Using compression and web friendly file types will help to assist with this. It is sometimes seen that an image that is not full resolution will result in poor quality, however most images todays or at least the programs that render them utilize compression without resulting in poor image quality.

I found this great article from Google Developers all about image qualities on the web, if you want to learn more you can check it out here