There are still several questions yet to be answered, including how Google will account for sites in other countries that only want to rank on their country’s version of Google and which may have slower load times in the U.S. Several users have complained that it is Google’s tools themselves (such as Google Analytics and Google AdSense) that slow their sites down, and they wonder whether having these Google features will end up penalizing their sites.

The truth lies somewhere between “We’re doomed” and “Hallelujah!” Google’s Matt Cutts says that fewer than 1% of sites will be affected by this new development. If you go to code.google.com, you can find several boots-on-the-ground ways of speeding up your site, all of which are Google approved.

Always include a keyword in your image name. Images with names like DSCN4321.jpg provide no information to image search bots. But if you name it something like “mens-blue-cashmere-socks.jpg” it will provide lots of information. Beware that if you use spaces in your filenames, they will be encoded, so if you name a file “cashmere socks.jpg” it will be encoded as  “cashmere%socks.jpg.” Use hyphens instead of spaces.

Use “alt” attributes to provide extra information if for some reason your image doesn’t show up on a browser. You can see an example in the first screen shot. The second screen shot shows how using alt attributes can give the reader information if for whatever reason the actual image doesn’t show up or isn’t supported in their browser configuration.

Image Optimization with alt attribute

Optimizing Images For SEO

Surround your image with descriptive text so that the crawlers can make an informed guess about what the image is in case filenames, and alt tags and title attributes aren’t available. This is more of a “belt and suspenders” approach, but it certainly can’t hurt and could help your SERP rankings.