Most search engine specialists often overlook the fact that images are an asset for organic search results and also for search engine optimization. You may not be aware of the fact that images have the power to drive traffic to your website and also include your website among various search engine results.
They are an integral part of your SEO efforts and therefore you must give them utmost importance when you’re already designing your website. You need to keep in mind several dimensions about image optimization in order to make sure that you secure the highest rank on the search engine results.
When it comes to image SEO, you must always think of implementing another tiny webpage within your webpage. In order to optimize images for search engines, you have to take into account factors like descriptive tagging, anchor text, url structure and many more. Have a look at some image optimization tips that you must consider in order to help your website enjoy the privilege of remaining on the top of search engine results.
1. Pick the right images for your website
Finding the most appropriate images for your web page is the first and foremost job that you must do. If you pick the right images that suit the theme and content of your website, you can encourage people to share the page and also create some great back links.
Recent researches show that though text is still the most important thing that a person checks in a website, the images are the main things that sells the web page. You can Google images in order to find the best one according to your web page.
2. Choose the right anchor text:
When it comes to image SEO, anchor text is another important factor that needs to be kept in mind. If you decide to link to the images with the text, your anchor text will play a significant role and how your image has been ranked for keywords will be important.
For instance if you link to an image with a generic term like image or photo, the search engines cannot decipher the actual information about the image.
3. Use the keywords in the file name:
Just as you may know that keywords in post URLs are important for all pages, the same is also true for the images. If you use keyword-rich words in your image file-name, you can assist the search engines to determine its relevancy.
As per the suggestions of Google, you must try to place all your images in a single folder rather than keeping them in random folders throughout the website.
4. The alt text must be descriptive:
The texts or tags are yet another way in which the search engines determine what exactly your image is about.
The search engines cannot determine the text content of a particular image and hence they will usually rely on the text that is there surrounding the image and the captions that are added. Therefore, always add a descriptive text so that the search engines determine the exact content of the image.
Therefore, if you want to make sure that your website ranks higher in the search engine results, make sure you practice effective image SEO.
Follow the tips mentioned above and enjoy remaining on the top of the search engine results.
This is a guest post by R. Lawrence smith. She is a professional writer & webmaster of some finance related sites. apart from finance, she also wrote other topics like – SEO, TECH , TRAVEL etc in other websites.
At one of my site, images are sending me most traffic. So I will have to say, if people are not using all these suggested methods then they are missing hell lots of traffic.
You have done fantastic job to convey the idea to have better SEO for images on blog.
Thanks for this. 🙂
Excellent tips. I started adding thumbnail images to my posts on all my sites a while back. Initially that was to brighten up the snippets appearing on home page and in the related posts links below posts. I use the primary keyword as the Alt but it had never occurred to me to link to the graphic in text. Don’t quite see the value of doing that in a post when the image is in that post so I’m assuming the writer means linking to images elsewhere on your site. Whether the images attract more traffic I don’t know. How would you test for that?
I also compress my images so that they load super fast and not just with Smush it!
There are many programs out there that will compress your image to very small size with out affecting the quality.
Yes, I also prefer doing that work offline, but if we don’t have the access to any tool than smush.it is a good alternative.
I hadnt considered optimizing the actual image names, thanks for the tip.
You are most welcome James, Hope these tips will help.
I totally agree with this post. The images on my blog generate a surprising amount of traffic from the search engines. Although, it can be time consuming to do this manually for all your images. There are some free wordpress plugins that generate alt tags and title tags based on the name of the image file. I’d definitely go that route to save time.
Yes, tools can be handy for this. Manually its a big pain to do it for all images. But somehow its need to be done…
Hey Sanjeev!
You have a nice blog and valuable contents.
Images are growing more important part of blog promotion. I noticed a greater number of traffic through image search and in this context its wise to optimize images.
Yes, with the ability to search through images, this is much more important to optimize them for SEO.
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