Website usability articles by UZilla.org

How to mix images and words for seo and usability

A picture tells a thousand words and a magazine browser, i.e. a real person, will typically skim through pages looking for that eye catching photo that screams out hey look at me, this may be worth reading. The magazine photo may also be accompanied with an intriguing headline to further entice the potential reader.

Website images play a similar role, to magazine images, when a potential reader is browsing your website. Within your website the user will click from page to page looking for something of interest which can be sign posted via a well chosen and positioned image. Within a webpage the image also plays a role in presentation and structure. Images certainly add to the overall appeal of a webpage and help convey the primary message.

How does the search engine browse websites of interest?

Finding your website, however, amongst all the websites out there requires enticing the search engine on the subject matter of the given search term. The search engine only sees the words, image labels are important but the characteristics that the search engine favors are written language based. Search engine heuristics (rules of thumb) need to determine the relevance, to a given search term, of your website and this relevance is based on a given webpage being structured and themed around the search term. Structure and theme should all relate to the end user, i.e. we do not recommend structuring a website, for the search engine, in such a way that will compromise the overall usability of the site. Images, however, should not replace the explicit message of your website as this subtlety will not be visible to the search engine. The complete message should be conveyed using words and then images should be added to enhance usability, for optimal search engine ranking.

Balancing usability with search engine optimization using words and images

Everything that is important to state within the context of an internet article, webpage or website should be stated explicitly in text. For search engine optimization avoid using images to exclusively convey all or part of the message. The photo of a crashed car with the text We'll take it from here works well on a billboard or magazine for an insurance company but does nothing for the search engine optimization of a webpage. Images, on websites, are best used as aids to support the message, attention grabbers or as ways to enhance the overall appeal of the website. Images can also help structure the webpage to make easily identifiable chunks of information visible to the reader. As metaphors images work but it is better not to over do the explanation of the metaphor in the text. By way of example if you have a website that is explaining the use of different software tools for website design you could use a chess metaphor to explain that certain (tools) i.e. chess pieces be used in certain situations. Chess piece images could then be used to break up the text into a more pleasing structure for the reader. Given that the target audience for your website is not chess players the text should not be embellished with descriptions of these images. In practice it is better to write the entire web content out as an article using only words. The text should then be partitioned into a suitable design structure and images should then be inserted to enhance the structure. This is for general cases but if the subject matter of the website is images, for example people's photographs, then this becomes the content and there is little point in describing the images although other reasons to include text within the context should be examined.

In summary a picture may tell a thousand words but for search engine optimization the words are the message.