Adding images to your company’s website doesn’t just offer up attention-catching eye candy for your existing visitors, it can help draw new ones to your website by helping you appear more prominently in SERP’s.

Having been in the business of Los Angeles website design and SEO for over ten years, I make certain that the images incorporated into my clients’ sites are not simply uploaded but optimized. A few of the tactics that I employ are quick and simple enough for you to put into practice in your own online marketing efforts next time you add images to your site.

In terms of what Google notices, images are a great showcase for your keywords.

Take care when labeling images.

Rather than simply saving and uploading Jpegs with random numbers or text, label them with your main keyword text and heading provided they are relevant. Search engines will be more likely to index you when they locate images labeled with your keywords.

However, do not overdo this and apply it to banners and other unrelated features (these are the ones you can just label with numbers) of your site as this will appear excessive and spammy.

Be sure to specifically include the term “image” or “picture” in the ALT description or caption of your images. While this might seem redundant, think about how you search for an image of something: you typically type in “[.....] image.” This will direct users doing the same to your site and demonstrate your relevance and value to the search engines.

Finally, make sure your images don’t get excluded from advanced searches.

Go into Google Webmaster Central and see that Enhanced Image Search is enabled for your images so they show up in both broad and narrowed down searches, thus affording you the maximum number of click-through opportunities and notice from the search engines.