Although having too many graphics on your website can cause some problems for search engine spiders if they are not implemented with search engine optimization in mind, things have changed over the years. If a page utilizes images as links, spiders are now able to reach the destination page, but the problem with image links is that they don’t provide the link popularity value and keyword phrase association for the destination page like a text-based link. Furthermore, Web developers need to pay attention to the file size of each image. Some search engine spiders will time-out if it takes too long to read an image because the file is too large. Spiders will stop indexing the entire page in this case. Another important fact to understand is that indexing isn't nearly as quick as HTML pages. Image files take up much more bandwidth so in return search engine spiders crawl images much less frequently.
A new benefit of using graphics is that they can provide an additional way for users to arrive at a website. The amount of traffic that can be referred to a website through an image search on Google Images and Yahoo! Images is rising. Through optimization, you can actually fill out specific information about images to allow them to have additional relevance. A good rule of thumb is to use graphics that are relevant to your site’s purpose, use them sparingly, make sure the file size for each is 12 KB or smaller, and remember to optimize all graphics.
