Search engine optimization is more than optimizing a written content. The increasing popularity of visual content online has given new prospects for marketers to nurture a website’s search traffic by optimizing images and videos. Optimizing images is an additional supplement for a websites to be found through image search. Outstanding logo or some stunning graphics can fascinate users towards your website just like crispy content.
This is one of the crucial elements of SEO that need to be considered while making a strategy for an organic search. Here will guide you through each aspect you need to know about optimizing for image search:
Image Size: The size of images plays a key role on overall site speed. Side speed is considered to be an important search ranking factor. Over sized images or heavy pictures are one of the biggest drawbacks for reducing the website loading speed especially on smartphones. However ask your designer to make the images that tempt the users, suitable for search network, fits in a size limit without sacrificing a quality and speed of a website. Always make sure to use the most valuable and compressing image file type that includes GIF, JPEG and PNG which grab the maximum online image traffic. Thus take the help of designer who can guide you better about the file types without sacrificing the quality and quantity.
Image Name: The name of image file can assist search engine to read content in context. This is how keywords come in the picture. For example: If you are uploading a photo of real estate photography, a precise file name should be real-estate-photography.jpg has more prospects to rank well in search rather than REP-1966.jpg. If you are a smart player then it can be optimized far better for SEO than the given example. You can use more specific name that defines the image more appropriately for users as well as for search networks.
Alt Attributes: It is the text alternative to the image which will perform if image fails to display. It is important element in SEO which plays a major role in optimizing the images. Alt Attributes helps the search engine to crawls the image with the alt tag make the job of marketers easy. Marketers add keywords in alt tag or title tag fields to get the thing optimized precisely.
Title Text: Title text is the name of the image that serves the purpose of reading the image filename. The big difference is it assist users and bots to read the text. While making a title text make sure to avoid underscores or dashes. In some cases title text becomes a substitute for image alt text.
Alt Text: It describes what the image portrays and help search engine work out not just on content of an image but the subject of the surrounding text. The digital marketing expert can understand the importance of alt text and they form the image that has proper alt text with clear descriptive information. It is important to present the alt text in 80 to maximum 150 characters.
Page URL and domain authority: If Images are hosted on an optimized page URL which contains quality and relevant content, then the chances of image SEO success increases. At the same time page domain authority can influence an image performance in Google Image Search. If a domain already had a status for delivering standard and relevant content, then image will perform better in search engine. Therefore Image SEO is equal to text-based SEO in this regard.
Stock Photography: This is one of the biggest debate over the past couple of years for using stock photography that creates negative impact on ranking. Google Matt Cutts as stated, that stock photos do not harm search ranking thus advertisers can make use of stock photography’s instead of original pictures as SEO is concern.
Image engagement and popularity: The belief of link building also applies to image search. The more people link to your image, more is the chances of augmented search traffic coming from it. This can be assisted by the use of sharing button along with your images. Once image gets shared in diverse sites the popularity of the image increases. It also derives attentions and build credibility.
Conclusions: Whenever you are optimizing an images to come on top in search results make sure to use high quality image, with related filename, normal image size, and eye-catching content with mesmerizing visual that help users to engage with the image.