In your attempt to build friendly sites for search engines, you always think to optimize the page tags like <title> and <meta> these you remember the first time. Well there are other ways to optimize your pages but you think that their relevance level is not to hight.
By optimizing the images for SEO you and can benefit for a larger number of visitors from image search, those can become clients, for me, usually this industry is always stimulated by the visual, basically this is what we sell images static images or video, both are containing one or more frames, this is one of the reasons needed to improve the SEO for the images displayed in our sites.
Here are some issues that you need to know when you optimize the images:
File name
If the picture has a proper name, it is more likely to be classified correctly by search engines, especially for search engines with functions such as images Google Images. A name like "notebook_apple.jpg" says much more than "10.jpg".
The size and quality
Because the size and quality are two important factors is difficult to choose where to make compromises. The lower image is a faster loading (small size), but at the same time with the smaller image you don't have the chances to get a better position in search results and especially to keep visitors that avoid to see a picture with poor quality.
On the other hand, images with good quality are going exactly the opposite. They will have a better position in search results, but this will increase the necessary time for the image to load.
The middle way between these two situations, and the most recommended, is to have the thumbnail displayed in the first page and when the thumb is clicked will open the image with big quality.
In this way, the page load faster for the user and if he want to take a look "more close" to the image can do that by a simple click.
Sites with good optimization can make the difference in large collections.
The alternative text (alt)
This should not be ignored for any picture from your page. The best alternative text is a brief description of the image. "Alt" helps search engines to "see" what the image contains comparing the alt text with the rest of the content, this helps you to a better positioning in search results.
A short and correct HTML tag for the image looks like this: <img src="notebook-apple.gif" alt="Notebook Apple" />
The text near the image
It is very important that the text around or near the image to express the image content. This follows from the "Google Images FAQ, which says:
"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. "
Less text in images
There are situations when you need to put text in the picture coz on the web you can't use many fonts, but it is often preferable to put around the picture that text, as much possible. One reason for this is that the text has the highest value for search engines. When you are searching for something on Google, the only way you can express the therms for search is by text... you write a text there in the google.com or yahoo.com search box... so if search engines don't know how to read text from images i mean visual or how hear our verbal queries, in order to have good results we need to adapt to their strategy.
It is best to do the images only with graphics, without text, the text it will be used (with the CSS) as background. Over the background, the text positions (all with CSS).