Search engine spiders, defined: Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler. Source: www.webopedia.com

Can search engine spiders ‘see’ your web images? With the emergence of Google images and other image search engines, the importance of indexing the images on your web site has become all the more important. While you should be adding ALT tags (defined: The ALT tag is meant to serve as an ALTernate if the image source does not exist, or if browsers have images disabled) and descriptions to your images for organic search engine ranking purposes, the only way for the image search engines to find your images (and furthermore, link to your web site) is by adding information that allows the spiders to see you.

For example:

Non-Optimized Image:	Optimized Image:
What you see:	What you see: Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota
What the spider sees:	What the spider sees: ALT=Mount Rushmore TITLE=Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota Caption= Mount Rushmore, Black Hills of South Dakota

The saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words” doesn’t hold true for search engines unless you tell the spider what it’s supposed to see. A fully optimized image includes the following elements: ALT tag, TITLE tag, thumbnail (version shown on the web) with a link to a larger version or additional content, and a descriptive caption beneath the image. Additionally, the file directories should be named similar to the topic.

Example of optimized image code (applies to the example above):

<a href=http://www.travelsd.com/_images/placestogo/rushmore/rushmore.jpg><img src=”/images/placestogo/mount-rushmore/mount-rushmore.jpg” alt=”Mount Rushmore” title=”Mount Rushmore, located in the Black Hills of South Dakota” /></a><br />

Resources: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_IMG.asp or http://www.htmlquick.com/reference/tags/img.html

Organically optimizing,

Robin