Image Optimization Tips for Organic SEO Ranking
Written by Pavan Kumar on October 31, 2009
Recently I was going through my Google Analytics data and was looking the referring sites section and found that more than 2% of my traffic is coming from Google Image Search. I was surprised to see that as I never got more than 2-3 visits from Google Image Search everyday on my old blog. The only reason for this massive increase in traffic from Google Image Search is Image Optimization.
Apart from writing a good article there are many other things that need to be taken care for a blog post and image optimization is one of them. There is nothing much to be done to optimize your images and it just takes few seconds. The main things for image optimization are proper name for the image, alt tag and proper positioning.
Important Points for Image Optimization:
SEO Friendly Image Names : The first you have to do is to rename the file with proper name. "image001.jpg" or "DSC001.jpg" doesn’t make sense for the search engine. If your image is related to a mobile renaming it something like "Nokia-5800-Front-View" makes sense. Search Engines cannot read the image to find what it is, instead they read the image name and otehr things like alt tag, surronding text etc to get more information about the image. So do rename your images to something meaningful and relevant to the current context.
Use Effective Alt Tag : Alt Tag will give more information about the image to the search engine. You have to use better text and keywords thus helping the search engine to know more about the image. For example if you have got a mobile realted image you can have the alt tag as – alt="Nokia Slim 5800 Mobile Side View" rather than – alt="mobile".
Proper Placement of Images : Search engines usually read the text surrounding the image to know more about it. So we need to take care in placing the image near to the relevant content. For example, if you are writing an article with general mobile trends in market in the first paragraph and then about a specific mobile in the last paragraph, it makes more sense to place the mobile related image closer to the last paragraph.
Using Relevant Anchor Text : When you are trying to use anchor text to link images, it is always a better idea to use text that is more relevant to the images. It would be better to use "Click Here for Nokia Mobile Images" or "Nokia 5800 Pictures" rather than using "Click Here".
If you keep the above points in your mind you will definitely get good amount of traffic from the image search results. You can always check for the total indexed images of your website by typing "site:yoursite.com" in "http://images.google.com". Google also suggests users to use JPEG rather than other formats. Also use hyphens (-) instead of unserscores (_) between words of the image. Finally if you are using images from other sites, rename the image and change the dimensions to avoid image duplication issues.
If you have any other thoughts and points do share with us in the comments section.
Also read: Image optimization for fast websites, Remove frames from Google images traffic
This article is written by Samrat who blogs at TechHail. TechHail is a technology blog on Computers, Mobiles, Internet, Windows, Software, Tips & Tricks, SEO and Blogging.
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Really useful tips!! Didn’t know many of them.:)