Luxury Real Estate

By Joey Pauley

Have you ever heard the expression a picture is worth a thousand words? Google hasn’t, and neither has Yahoo. That’s right — search engines cannot view images. What does that mean?

When you see a picture of Brian Losh at our fabulous European Conference in Salzburg, Austria you see this:









Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

But what a search engine will see looks much less handsome:

<img width="154" height="115" alt="John Brian Losh in Salzburg"  src="johnBrianLosh.jpg"/>
a> Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

What search engines find attractive may not be so great for people viewing your site. What can you do to please them both? Make sure you use alt tags that describe the image (i.e. John Brian Losh in Salzburg, Austria). Also, make sure the image name and text around the image is relevant.

Marketing your site for consumers and Search Engines is a balancing act. By adding the proper text around an image you can make them both happy. How happy? ...As happy as Brian is skiing while I am in the office.


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their Web and technology needs. At last our weeklong wait has come to an end and we have been greatly rewarded with this excellent bit of information from Joey. Amazing! So search engines are like Mr. Magoo: blind, stumbling around and mumbling goofily until they run into exactly what they’re looking for. What a funny image.