There’s an area that is often overlooked in SEO and that’s images. Just like the words on a website, images generate traffic and links, too.

In terms of aesthetics, images are an integral part of website design. They break up a copy-heavy page and give site visitors instant visual stimulation. In terms of SEO, images can be optimized and bring additional visitors to a website. Actively using images as part of your overall optimization strategy can pay dividends.

Image Search Optimization Tips

Image naming: Give image filenames a title that reflects the content and is descriptive such as “Sony Ericsson C905″ instead of “SEC905.jpg”. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Don’t stuff your Alt Tags full of keywords though- especially ones that don’t relate to the rest of your page as they run the risk of being seen as spam.

Image linking: Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to relevant articles and/or blog posts on your website. If you are sending out press releases or contributing articles to other websites, provide an image link.

Image quality: Good quality pictures with high contrast tend to work better. Make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails.

Image formatting: Photos saved as JPG files and other graphic image types as GIFs are the preferred image formatting.

Image freshness: Keep images fresh. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords it’s worth re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy.

Image appearance: Further increase relevancy by optimizing the page the image appears on. Search engines look at text surrounding an image to determine relevancy.Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings.

Image duplication: Avoid duplicate image content on the website. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don’t want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don’t want indexed.

Image filter: Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.

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Blogging is very important to ecommerce businesses. It’s one of the easiest ways to update the websites content, and it also demonstrates expertise about the offered products. Blogging can complement online shops products and offer a reason for people to return to them. The return on the blogging investment is quite high in terms of content, SEO, trust and reputation.

Consider blogging because:

Blogging Builds Trust
Ecommerce sites often focus on attracting visitors for the immediate sale, but sometimes potential customers want to learn more about a business and products before they’re ready to make a purchase. With a traditional store, consumers know where to go if they have questions. It’s more difficult to find the same level of trust with an online store. Providing valuable information to potential customers builds trust based on long-term considerations.

Show Off Expertise
Consumers usually purchase from companies that have expertise with their products and in their industry. A blog is an opportunity to demonstrate this expertise, to share insider tips and to discuss issues of interest with your customers and provide them with valuable insights and information.

Easy SEO
Search engines like sites that constantly update their content. Blogging is an easy way to update website content, while providing something of value to potential customers at the same time. Also, including top industry keywords will help build valuable links to the Ecommerce site’s content.

Blog Comments & Feedback
Blogging gives online retailers the opportunity to have a conversation with and get feedback from customers and others in the industry. Not every blog will get comments & feedback right away but after blogging for a while, there should be an audience to tap into from time to time with short, one-question surveys. Additionally a focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters.

Ecommerce Site’s Personality
Many ecommerce sites have a personality that is associated with the company. Since people are more willing to purchase from another person it’s recommended to include some information about the personalities ‘behind the scenes’ of the ecommerce site.

Blog Themes
A blog’s theme should be consistent with a company’s focus, yet universal enough that the blog is not solely about things the company sells. A blog that only exists to link to its corporate site will not be trusted. A site selling cameras, for instance, should go beyond making the blog a secondary camera sales tool and get involved with photography as an art and business. It’s secondary to cameras, but it is directly related to the interests of potential customers.

Start Blogging
Most blogs are created using free or low-cost online sites such as Blogger from Google, WordPress, and Typepad . These services are simple to use and configure and it’s possible to have a blog up and running in less than an hour. With a bit of extra work, the blog can become part of the ecommerce site, adding value to the content and SEO.

Nevertheless, ecommerce retailers should be aware that setting it up and linking it to the website is the easy part. Keeping the blog updated, active and topical is the hard part. Ideally, the blog should be updated once a week. The more relevant content and posts are the more value the blog with have as a resource for new customers.

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Despite what a lot of people think search engine optimization (SEO) for dynamic ecommerce sites is actually easier to implement than for non-dynamic sites, since dynamic sites contain only a few template pages (like: product page, category page etc.) so by simply optimizing a few template pages the entire site is optimized.

Although search engine optimization affects mainly the organic search results, the paid or “sponsored” results, such as Google AdWords are also affected due to the increase in the landing page score, that way you can benefit twice from the optimization efforts.

It is recommended to use a professional search engine optimization firm for the optimization effort but anyone with a small technical knowledge can implement at least the basic optimization procedures which should result in a great contribution.

Google offers webmasters a great SEO startup kit with all the basic tips to successfully optimize your site.

In this post we decided to focus and few simple to implement optimization tips which should result in the greatest contribution:

Tip #1: create unique, accurate page titles

A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The <title> tag should be placed within the <head> tag of the HTML document. For a dynamic template page, like the product page, the title tag should be created dynamically via code.

Sample <title> tags:

Tip #2: add unique, relevant and well structured content

Search engines love content and give high scores for pages with unique, relevant and well structured content. Therefore you should carry out the following:

Add the HTML Meta tags: Including only relevant and unique keywords for each product for the title and description and make sure to include the Meta tags within each page of the landing pages.

1. HTML heading tags (<h1> to <h6> tags).
2. Unique relevant product descriptions: it is recommended not to use the manufacturer’s description as is, rather to modify it a bit and make it more relevant for both the product and the user.
3. Long tail keywords: use various keywords that are related to the product and that go beyond the brand, model and category.
4. Product reviews: product reviews not only add relevance for your site, but the user generated content will also be unique content that is searchable.

Tip #3: improve the structure of your URLs

Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website can not only help you keep your site better organized, but it could also lead to a better SEO score by the search engines.

Sample URL structures:

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