One of the most overlooked areas of search engine optimization or SEO is image based search optimization. Many people don’t realize this, but images can bring in significant traffic from search engines like Google Images. Thus, if you want to enhance your web traffic, you should optimize the pictures on your site to draw in more visitors. Luckily, image optimization is quite easy if you implement the following guidelines.
Image Based Search Optimization – Alt Text
If you see an image of a flower, you immediately realize what it is. The challenge is that instant recognition is not (currently) possible for search engine spiders. Rather, you need to assist the spiders to better understand your images through using alt text. Hence, alt text is essentially the text a search engine uses for understanding image content. Here is one example of alt text for image based search optimization: <img src="red-flower.jpg" alt="Red Flower" />
Image Based Search Optimization – File size
The speed at which your website loads is vital for effective search engine optimization. Your images should be optimized so that they do not affect your load times. One way of doing that is by reducing the size of the images as much as possible. However, you should be very careful when reducing image size to ensure you preserve the image quality.
It is also important to avoid letting the browser resize large pictures on your website to appear smaller. This could affect the quality of the image and give a poor view of your site. To solve this issue, always make use a good image editing software to convert your pictures to the desired size.
Image Based Search Optimization – File Name
To make your images search friendly, you should add a descriptive file name before uploading it on your site. You will want to use specific keywords that you want the image to rank highly for. For instance, you can run a test of other search friendly images by doing a sample search to view the pictures that rank highly for the specific keywords you’ve typed in. You will find that the keywords have also been infused into their file names.
Image captions are also important for good SEO practices, since they are some of the most-read content pieces on your site. The use of image captions will help reduce your overall bounce rate.
If you've spent a lot of time creating a killer post, don’t miss out on the opportunity to expose your content to a wider audience by not making your images more search friendly. This is a vital part of your search engine optimization efforts, and will help boost your search engine rankings.
Need help optimizing your images, or interested in SEO for your website? Contact Golden Tusk Marketing at info@goldentuskmarketing.com.
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