How do I Maximize the Value to My Site : Photo Tagging for Real Estate Sites

The first thing you should note about search engines is that their software can only read text. When I say text, I don't mean text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a flash file or those that appear in a video. I mean text like you see everywhere on thesitewizard.com's articles - plain, unadulterated, ordinary text.

While it's true that some search engines have the rudimentary ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot assume that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want them to have. In fact, I suspect that only Google can do this, and even then only to extract straight forward links embedded in the file. And certainly no search engine I know can view an image file or video and determine the text that it contains. 

This is not to say that you cannot create a photo-album site, Flash games site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, Flash, Videos on your site. However, you should write content for each of those non-text elements to describe them.

For example, you should describe each picture in the "alt" text for the image. For those who don't know what I’m saying, images are put into a web page using HTML code.
How many times have you googled your name and look in the image or even the video area on the left menu of a google search page? Well do it! It is important for you to understand what you are doing correctly and what aspects of your site are being done poorly. Proper tagging of pictures is an area that 90% of realtors truly do not understand when building a site.

The Importance of tagging images
I started a few years ago to research the value of tagging photos and what words to use in tagging for the search engines. I found proper tagging to be very beneficial with the search engines. If you start to do searches for topics there are 4 areas that you are able to search from;

1. "Everything" - this area brings up all websites

2. "Maps" – this is for people who have signed up for google location 

3. "Videos" for agents that have created videos for their site hosted by youtube.com or other hosts and finally photos for the agents that have tagged their photos correctly. Remember google can’t see the photo only identifies the photo based on the tagging.