It’s pretty obvious that images and photos are important for your blog.  As a matter of fact, us bloggers go to pretty extreeme lengths to get great photos and illustrations.  Many of us are paying thousands of dollars a month in photo rights fees.

So why are you neglecting your photos?

Many bloggers are not as dilegant about maximizing the SEO potential of their images.  Actually, most bloggers do not realize that you can get a lot of search engine traffic because of your photos.

The obvious way occurs when other sites link to your great photos.  Clearly, that will help your SEO.

However, the images themselves can draw a lot of eyeballs, but you have to love your alt tags.  Take a look at this screencap to see what I mean.

When the search engines crawl your site, they are looking at your images too.  The alt tags are what Google uses to identify the subject matter of each photo.

So think about it.  If you’ve paid all this money for a great photo, don’t you want people to be able to find it?  Or what if these are great photos that you took, and no one else has them! This is how you’ll attract new visitors to your site, and you won’t have to reply soley on promotion from other sites.

Just think about how many times you’ve used Google’s Image search.  Now you’ll be a player in that space too.

Your alt tags should be just as keyword rich as your posts themselves.  Make sure to describe the photo and use the full names of the people in the photo.

There’s also a plugin called SEO Images that will at least do some of the work should you forget.  At least install the plugin to get you started.

Remember, spending a little extra time up front will pay off for you in the long run.