Someone asked me how I use photos to help to optimize my site for the search engines. Well, what most people do is name their photos with keywords. A lot of times you can do a thing called "alternative text (alt-tag)" where you can insert a description for your picture. An example of alternative text is when you right-click on a picture and select picture properties. You can actually see the description there in your alt-tag if you have one and you can also see the name. So you not only name your picture a certain specific keyword, but you can also insert some text that represents keywords or keyword phrases in your alt-tag.

However, a word of caution, you don't want to stuff too many keywords in there because that's not going to help you at all. You might want to use one specific keyword phrase when you are doing it, maybe two, but that's it. Search engines don't like keyword stuffing. They basically see it as spam. To them it looks like garbage content and not well thought out keyword content. So, make sure you take your time to choose one specific keyword phrase for your photos.

You can also post your photos on social networking sites like Flickr.com. Now, when you're talking about Flickr, that's more like off-off-off-page optimization. However, when you're talking about SEO with specific photos, that's really about all you can do. You can also get links from other pages and point those links to that page where you have those things. That can help you out in your optimization efforts.

Remember though that the key to getting higher in the search engines is by having links to your pages from sites with more authority. If you have links entering your site from highly ranked authority pages that will be a tremendous help in your rankings. Well-ranked sites pointing to your site are going to help you out. In addition to Flickr, you can also use social bookmarks. If you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can go up to the top and bookmark pages so that you can go back.

Whenever you're on your computer and you're using either browser (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), you can go and find the actual pages that you saved by clicking on bookmarks. It will list all of your bookmarked pages. But you do need to know that social bookmarking is a little bit different. What you do is you go to pages on the internet and you bookmark them on the internet so that you can go back to those pages on the internet and find them. Do realize that the search engines actually get to see all of that. And once they do, it will benefit your page ranks all the more.

Take your time and choose in demand keywords for your photos to improve the rankings of your pages and your sites overall ranking as well.