Optimizing Images in Joomla
Written by Jeff Gatesman Thursday, 30 April 2009 00:21
If you have ever added an image to an article in your joomla-driven site and hit the insert button before writing an alt description, you know that joomla tries to coerce you into adding one. Joomla is such a smart application that it really just wants to help you out by driving traffic to your site, whether it sounds like it or not.
True, the alt tag is there for accessibility reasons but it is becoming more important for search engine optimizing. If you are unaware of the importance of optimizing images on your site for search engine ranking, then you should read this article first.
Joomla may be a smart application, but oddly, if you were to keep the default Joomla setup, the majority of your images would go un-indexed by the search engines. The primary reason for this is the robot.txt document that sits at the root directory and tells the search engine robots which files and folders to access, and which ones to leave alone. By default, Joomla includes this line in the text document:
Disallow /images/
This command instructs the robots to NOT index any content in the images directory, so it just skips that folder completely. To solve this problem, simply open the Robots.txt file in any text editor and remove that one line.
Make certain your images are relevant
If you are writing an article about backpacking through Yosemite, then your images should reflect that, and you will naturally end up with images that have alt tags such "backpacking through Yosemite". Ultimately what you are looking for are alt tags and file names that reflect the article title and keywords.
One last thing you should do to make your Joomla site image-optimized is to change the directory for your images. The default location for images in Joomla is www.yoursite.com/images/stories/. It is better to have your images closer to the root of your site when search engines add relevance to them, so you should change the default to the /images/ directory. 
You can change this quite easily by going into the Administration page Site > Global Configuration > System > Media Settings and then change the "Path To Image Folder" box.
Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites
