How to Save an Image-Based Website

Designing your website with solely images is never a good idea. Google can’t read images, so instead of seeing the text that is on your website, it sees a load of nothing. It can’t figure out what your site is about, so it doesn’t recommend it to searchers. A big sign of web designers who know nothing about SEO is that they design websites solely with images.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to go out and get your website totally redone. There is still some (but not much) hope for image-based websites in the SEO world. Here are some clever tricks you can try to get Google to like you.

1. Add keyword-rich articles to your site as text, using an image border or layout. Link to the article pages with plain text on your site homepage so that they’re findable by Google.

2. Use “alt” tags with your images, and have keywords in there.

3. Rename your images keywords/descriptions, and then reupload to the site.

4. Avoid using images for your main site navigation.

5. Properly use meta tags in your website’s HEAD section.

6. Make your site load as quickly as possible. That’s a new factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Compress your images or make them preload with a javascript.

Then you’ll want to heavily focus your SEO efforts on Off-Page optimization, including Social Bookmarking and increasing your Alexa rank. You’ll want to hire a professional SEO (like myself) to help you out with that kind of stuff. And just like that, voila! You have saved an image-based website from Google hell.

BONUS TIP: Using WordPress? Install the “SEO Friendly Images” plugin that will automatically add “alt” tags to your pictures! See my Basic WordPress SEO tutorial for more info.