Here’s Looking at You

By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur magazine|June 1, 2010

Search for just about any topic using any search engine and you are likely to see a hodgepodge of links for information, news, video, images and even blog posts.

That’s because search engines strive to provide blended search results. To ensure that images are included in the results, search engines give them preferential treatment.

Because SEO optimized images are more likely to appear in search engine results, optimizing your images in coordination with your pages boosts search engine rankings for both. Many businesses overlook or disregard image SEO, or do it all wrong. Properly implementing an SEO strategy can give you a competitive edge, especially when your competitors are clueless.

“It’s time to rethink SEO,” says Jose Nunez, an internationally recognized search engine consultant who splits his time between Moldova and Salt Lake City. “Traditional SEO relies heavily on search engine optimized text to raise a page’s profile and facilitate indexing. Unfortunately, images contain no text describing what they are. Search engines must rely on tags, metadata, captions, file names and other contextual clues to identify and properly index images.”

Fortunately, optimizing your use of these contextual clues can…

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