Should All Images Receive The Same SEO Treatment?

Date: 20th June 2008

Here is a quick question. Should all the images used on your site receive the same treatment when it comes to search engine optimization?

By all images I mean everything. Little gifs like arrows or bullets along with larger photos and graphics all fall into the image category and could all receive the same search engine optimization strategies.

The answer is fairly straightforward. The images you want fully optimized would be those that you would also like to see in an image search for your site. Arrows, bullets and other incidental gifs have no real value so your search engine optimization strategies can bypass them quite safely.

In fact, you don’t want people searching for bullets or arrows to find yours and be using them in links. Your site will get extra hits, but because they are accessing your gifs - the hits do nothing to increase your traffic.

Images that you do want to see in the search results should have all the normal search engine optimization strategies applied to them. This may help them rank higher in image searches.

Simple question - simple answer. You would be surprised at how many people apply search engine optimization strategies to every single image on their pages. If you can get a keyword pump out of an image then optimize it. If it is a little gif that cannot add any value to the site - leave it alone.