Image ALT and Title Tags

In an ongoing effort to try and increase my blog page views i set my focus on the thousands of pictures that i have uploaded. I noticed from my Blogger Stats page that most people visit my site through Google Image Search. It is because when people are looking for something in Google they type in the word then click on the very first website that Google suggests. If they don't find what they are looking for they may go back and click on the second or third link. My blog is not popular enough to show up in the top 5 for any keywords. Even when someone types in "DIY infrared camera filter", which is the exact title of one of my posts, it still doesn't show up until the 6th link. This is because of several reasons including backlinks, page ranks, etc. I'll get into that later.

BUT... with Google Image Search people are more likely to scroll down and quickly look at lots of pictures before clicking on the one they like. That's why my 2 most popular pages, IQ Light and TV Antenna and Fractals are getting their hits. When people type in words similar to those titles, my images show up at around 4th, 7th and 10th.

I also noticed though, that many of the images they were clicking on were NOT the pictures that i took, but rather the few images that i had copied from another page. I was a bit confused, until i realized that MY pictures were saved as something like "DSC002345.jpg" and the copied images were like "Fractal_TV_Antenna.jpg".

Google can do lots of things but sometimes it needs a little help. I could take a great picture of Monarch Butterfly's, but if it isn't labeled, Google doesn't know what it is. It can only guess based on the text surrounding the image.

The two ways that i could label an image is to download the image, rename it then re-upload it as "Monarch Butterfly Migrating.jpg", but that would take forever. Plus i would have to go back to each page and fix the link.

The easier way to do the same thing is to add ALT tag and Title tag. Instead of just /"img src=".....DSC002345.jpg"\ i can change it to be /"img alt="Monarch Butterfly's Migrating near Lake Erie" title="Monarch Butterfly's" src=".....DSC002345.jpg"\. By doing that, Google Image Search will hopefully show my image near the top of the page when people type in those words.

So even though these two images look the same, the one on the right is much more likely to show up in an image search because it has the ALT tag within the HTML code. (mouse over the image to see the TAG)

No ALT and Title tag	Has ALT and Title tags

Now having said that, i have 280 blog posts and between 2 and 20 pictures per page. So it will take some time to label every image. As of now i'm only 1/6th of the way done.