Believe it or not, photos can actually be used to improve your search engine rankings. How? You might ask. Especially since I've repeated the mantra that search engines cannot read images and therefore sites with images for buttons are hurting their rankings.
Well, here's how. When a search engine spider looks at your site they actually skip over the images, BUT it will look at the image alt text. When you add an image the html looks like this:
Quote:
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<IMG src="URL" ALT="Insert your Alternative Text Here"> |
Obviously the URL is the image address. The ALT text is what would be read aloud to someone who was blind or shown if an image was not available in a normal browser. The ALT text is a great place to put some keywords but MAKE SURE the text is still relevant to the actual image.
Like I might show our logo for Home Inspector Pro software and make the alt text ALT="Home Inspector Pro Inspection Software" thereby getting some keywords in. If you show your logo you could put ALT="Houston home inspector logo". If you show some photos in a photo album, make sure to put the city name of where the photo is from, thereby increasing ranking for that city. Ideally you should have an ALT text for every image on your site.