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To get the most out of the images on your site, you have to optimize them. According to R.J. Pittman of Google, good image optimization starts with having the best quality of images that you can have.

The next step is to have an expressive title as well as rich descriptive content that explain the image. Webmasters also have the opportunity to provide topic tags, which are keywords that a searcher might use in a query.

As Pittman tells special guest WPN correspondent Eric Enge, the more information that the user provides for the image, the better Google can index and surface the image. Google is even developing RDFa tag structure, which would allow it to work off of a new language vocabulary that users could embed into their Web pages. The html structure would provide a means for search engines to identify various features of the image and thus provide more accurate image results.

Despite all the additional exposure images could bring to websites, Google is not seeing images being utilized as well as they could be. Pittman encourages webmasters to embrace images since they improve understanding and, ultimately, click-through rate (CTR) once they are indexed by the search engines. Are you embracing the use of images?