Most people will agree there is nothing more annoying than going to a site and it taking forever and a day to download all the images just so you can see the site. Then after waiting, realizing that the site is completely ugly, irrelevant,or not what you thought is was, and wasting your time.

A lot of newbie web designers rely completely on the use of images to display their clients websites. In fact, a lot of times when you see text on a site it isn't actually text, it's an image of text.

You could have a great piece of copy with all of your well researched out keywords, but if it's placed into a graphic by your web designer than it won't do you any good.

Remember search engines can only read text, not images.

With that said, we all know that if you don't have images your site is absolutely boring and pretty ugly too. I don't think that is the image that most of us want our business to have.

Realize that you need to have a balance between readable text and images to make it pretty. But the key here is using.....balance.

Whenever you are using images, be sure to optimize them by saving them out as a .gif or .jpeg format in a 72dpi resolution or lower.

.gif seems to be better for text type images (like logos) and .jpeg is better for pictures.

By saving your images out in these formats you will save on the download time on your site, so people don't get irritated and leave. It will still not make to much of a difference if you have images that are as big as the entire screen. Make sure you choose your images wisely and break up bigger images into smaller slices for a quicker download time.

Now I mentioned earlier in this ebook that you can use an ALT tag description to place keywords into your site. This is a very effective and often overlooked way to add some keywords to your page.

Another clever way to use your images to boost your keyword count is to name your files with a keyword in it.

For instance instead of having myfile.jpg, you could have dogcollars.jpg if you sold dog collars.

Most of your competitors will not know that this is a great way to add more keywords to a site.

When done correctly, images and graphic can enhance a site's look and offer a place for added keyword placement.

Leah West
http://www.westmarketing-design.com

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