In the world of search engine optimization and delivering the most relevant and user friendly web pages, images play a huge role. From a user standpoint, an image is worth a thousand words, and users certainly are not going to read 1,000 words. However, they would much rather view a picture. The better optimized the picture file is the quicker the page will load and this gives you a double dip at enhancing your site.

1. Your web site loads faster which makes users happy by not having to wait, as well as spending a few extra precious seconds reading your content


2. Search spiders will not choke on slow loading pages, and are more likely to index your page and images.

Images not only add a great esthetics value to a web site, but can also be a source to bring more users to your web site. If a user searches for an image using the Google image search, and your image ranks highly for the search term, a user may click on the image which will take them to your web site. One way to help your rankings is to use surrounding text that correspond to the image captions (alt tags) as well as the image file name. A great tip is to create an image and set it on the page as a background to the table cell, then add the appropriate text on top of the image using .CSS to format it properly so it looks as if it is all one image. The user will not know or care that it is not one image; the image itself will have a smaller file size and load faster; the search engines will pick up the text on top of the image and apply some relevancy to the image while indexing both the image and the text.According to the Google Images FAQ section: “Google analyzes the text on the page adjacent to the image, the image caption and dozens of other factors to determine the image content. Google also uses sophisticated algorithms to remove duplicates and ensure that the highest quality images are presented first in your results.”