The Mona Lisa painting by Leonardo Da Vinci is open to so many interpretations that it is a perfect example of the picture tagging challenge for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Search Engines do not know if Mona Lisa is really smiling, or just letting you know that she “knows”…..
Research for this post on tagging pictures for SEO brought us to the Wikipedia page for Mona Lisa. It appears that many doctors believe that Mona Lisa might have had high cholesterol that probably caused fatty deposits under her eyes, that helped with that perennial enigmatic smile.
Popular press articles like the Telegraph UK, ascribe the Mona Lisa-cholesterol theory to Vito Franco of the University of Palermo in 2010. When we did some search on Google Scholar we found that the earliest cited reference to Mona Lisa’s possible cholesterol condition is in a 2004 article
“Xanthelasma and lipoma in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa,” by Dequeker, Muls and Leenders. It turns out that medical scholars refer to this stream of research as “Xanthelasma.”
We wanted to illustrate the tagging of a Mona Lisa picture in the context of the cholesterol-xanthelasma, so here goes with a public domain picture of Mona Lisa:
- If we wanted to do only one thing with the image, it would be to name it in the file name as we would like folks to find it and its associated content.Since the purpose of this blog post is to alert hi-tech/high knowledge businesses about image tagging for SEO, and we think that the cholesterol explanation is interesting, we are calling the image “Mona Lisa cholesterol-xanthelasma- image tagging SEO-StratoServe,” This is the name you see if you tried to download the image and save it.
When it comes uploading the image to this post, there are some options that WordPress or your content system will give you. These could include ALT-TEXT, Keywords, Description and you should simply fill up the fields provided. Just keep in mind that you have a message to give your reader with the image and its associated text that answers the web searchers question.
It may well be that folks interested in Mona Lisa’s cholesterol condition have absolutely no interest in SEO, but they would not be disappointed if they searched “Mona Lisa Cholesterol” and came to this page. Similarly there may be folks searching for “Image SEO for high tech products” and only have a mild interest in Mona Lisa, and we hope that they will not be disappointed with this post, either !
Also see the LinkedIn post: Do you call your resume file “CV” ? The cardinal photo SEO sin.