On Wednesday, I discussed the importance of fully optimizing images, video, and other media. Today, I want to give you some guidelines on how to take advantage of the people who are searching for media.

First of all, make your filename easy to remember. For example, if your picture is of your dog in his Halloween costume, you might name it dachshund-hot-dog.jpg. The name is keyword rich and tells the search engines a lot about what they are going to see in the picture.

Next, you are going to want to assign appropriate alt and title tags. The alt attribute specifies alternative text to display in place of the media if the user has their images turned off in their browser. For search engines, the alt text can be another indicator of what the element of the page is about and thence, what the entire page is about.

Title tags can be used to annotate many different things on the web site. For example, they can be used on images, objects, applets, and more. Title tags denote what will be displayed when a mouse hovers over that object or what will be read if a user is utilizing screen reading software.

Many web designers prefer to use graphics instead of text to represent links or menu options. While it might look cool or be helpful to users, it really doesn’t help for SEO purposes because search engines can’t read the graphics. If you decide to use a graphic as opposed to text, be sure to use title text that describe the page where the link is pointed for that image.

Additionally, use the alt element in the graphic itself to reinforce the meaning to the search engines. For example, your graphical navigation links should look like this:

So, follow these tips and get the most SEO out of your images and videos. Have a good weekend!