Images can also help drive traffic to your website

The lack of copy present is a comment I often hear used in criticism of a website.  In many circumstances, this seems to me a somewhat dated and relatively unfair assessment. Unless a website is made up of a collection of near-empty webpages, there must be some form of substantial, and hopefully useful, content in there somewhere.

The above criticism is usually delivered with respect to search engine optimisation and the lack of information available to be indexed by web crawlers.  The assumption here is that copy is the only really valuable information visible on a webpage that can be indexed and used to direct visitors there.  The flaw with this is that the goal of a search engine is to deliver valuable content to their users - and content can be found in many more forms, each valuable to a user in different ways.

One particularly useful form, to both the user and for attracting visitors, is images.  An often neglected or misused asset of a webpage, images have been found to be a major source of traffic for many websites that have been built with a certain attention to detail.  Below I will outline a few tips that can be used to allow your images to work better for you.

Note: don't forget that a computer (or web crawler) cannot derive meaning from an image in the same way we do by just looking at it.

The filename

As good a starting point as any, the filename is often overlooked as a way of allowing meaning to be associated with an image.  The filename should be treated as a title for the image and be relatively short and sweet.  A useful detail to note is that Google treats a hyphen as a space and an underscore as a connector ("image-name" = image name / "image_name" = imagename) so the former may prove to be more useful.  Also, spaces and special characters should be avoided and lowercase characters used whenever possible.

The alt tag

Surprisingly, this attribute is often left blank. Short for alternate, its primary function is to provide a text based option for screen readers so those users who may be visually impaired can also benefit from the image. This positive in terms of accessibility combined with the further opportunity for adding further detail to the image is why it should be used to provide a meaningful description.  A common mistake is to try and use a lot of keywords here and this isn't helpful - certainly not to the visually impaired user.  Instead, the description should be concise and accurate.

Optimise the image

It is no secret that search engines take into account page load times when ranking search results.  Therefore, you should ensure you spend the little time it takes to optimise your images properly.  There are tools available to help with this and I recommend ImageOptim (Mac) or RIOT (Windows).

Focus on semantics

The people behind search engines are clever and too often we try to misdirect them with little tricks such as image replacement. Not only do these tricks often require additional and unnecessary markup, they are also rarely, if ever, future proof.  In the end they can be more harmful than they are helpful if they become considered spamming techniques due to misuse. Semantically correct markup is always important, so focus on this instead.

Circling back to the original criticism about a webpage's apparent lack of content.  If a designer has provided a webpage weighted in favour of images over copy (and they are good at what they do) then the chances are it was done deliberately.  This likely means that the images themselves are considered to provide valuable information to users and do so in a more effective way than copy could.  This sort of thought process usually provides what search engines are looking for above all else - useful content for their users.