If you want to get a glimpse into the mind of a search engine imagine they’ve completely redone Louvre.  Everywhere that a painting used to hang has been replaced with a frame around the text .img.   How long would you stay?  Would you keep coming back if that is all you found?  More importantly how would you categorize all those pictures?

That’s the world a search engine faces.  I’ve been criticized for not including enough images in my Web sites and I know it’s true.  I’ve probably trained myself a little to well to behave like a search engine when flying through cyberspace, but that’s partly because my clients have taken Fred’s advice hook line and sinker (insert man fishing and big fish on end of line image here).   Yeah I know you were hoping I would break down and use a photo.

Of course it isn’t an either or world.  In reality you do need images, people love them and at the end of the day the Internet was not built for the pleasure or use of web crawlers it was built for you and me.  The solution is pretty simple, each time you use a picture write an “alt tag” or alt attribute into the code.  If you aren’t a code monkey, than make sure that your designer either does this or if you’re using a content management system that it is capable of inserting alt attributes for you.