Businesses concerned with improving their website's search engine optimisation (SEO) should turn their attention to realising the full potential of images, it has been claimed.

According to Econsultancy's Patricio Robles, publishers tend to miss out on the fact that SEO techniques can be applied to images as well as text

"Not implementing SEO techniques with your images could mean that you're missing out on valuable traffic from Google Image Search, which is one of Google's most popular properties," he explained.

A good way to maximise SEO with images, he added, is to tag them with descriptive sentences as opposed to single words.

Mr Robles explained that doing so would enable the more fluent use of keywords, which would ensure higher SEO rankings and therefore generate more traffic.

Google Image Search also prefers larger images with better quality, so these should be prioritised when available, he added.

This comes after Stephen Riegel, a search expert at Faction Media, wrote on a BtoB blog that SEO is now more important than ever to businesses due to the recession.

Web publishers, he claimed, need to ensure they make the most out of SEO since budgets are now tighter.