Posted by Larry Sullivan

When you have a website, you want to build and optimize it to rank as well as it can in the major search engines. Everyone wants to be on the first page. Whether is it global or local search, there are many techniques a webmaster can employee to accomplish this.

Small business owners, please be aware that most web designers are not search engine experts or marketers. Your website might look great to you but how does it look to the search engines? That is the key to good site optimization.

I bring this topic up, because Chris Smith wrote an excellent article, Using Images For Local SEO  at Search Engine Land the other day. I learned quite a bit from some of the neat ideas Chris provided. There are too many to list here but I recommend you check them out.  Chris said:

“A lot of small business websites I see out in the wild are pretty thin on content.”

“Though, if they were more detailed in many ways, I wouldn’t have to call them, nine times out of ten… a picture is worth a thousand words, so I see both SEO value and benefit to user-experience in beefing up local biz sites’ image usage.”

Everyone has images on their website-if you can help show off who you are and increase your search visiblity, well then I say that is a win-win.  I never really thought about the images and the role they can play. Chris definitely gives you more options to “get the most out” of what you have in your website.