Matt Cutts SEO Videos: Should I Expect Increased Traffic if I Optimize my Images?
For many webmasters there's a fine balancing act between adding images to their websites and those same images taking up perhaps valuable advertising space. In a lot of cases, however, images aren't simply a choice but are vital to their sites. For example, say you run a commercial website selling physical products - then you obviously need to display them; is it a good idea to optimize those images?
Perhaps at this point you're asking what is image optimisation?
Basically, when you optimise an image a number of things happen.
Firstly you need to use a programme such as Adobe Photoshop to make your image suitable for the web. By saving all your images for the web, they will load faster and still look fantastic.
Secondly, you need to add alt tags to your images so that the search engine spiders know that as they crawl your web page that the photo you've so carefully chosen is an image related to whatever text is on the page. Say it's a heart shaped diamond ring - then instead of the search engine spider just seeing a jpeg or png image, it sees heart shaped diamond ring! Additionally, people with disabilities will also know what it is as when they hover their mouse over it, the words pop up or a voice will read it for them.
See what Matt Cutts has to say about the benefits of optimising your images in terms of increased traffic.
