Search Engine Optimization – Ranking for Images
Learning about SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is key if you want to grow your blog. Without it, your blog will appear nothing more than another collection of text amongst the millions of others on the web.
Despite the fact that text is often looked at first for optimization, you also have to explore optimizing your images. Many search engines have an image search tool, and searchers can often find images through the traditional/textual results (using a standard “image of x” query). Without tapping into the number of queries for images, you are leaving out a wide spectrum of searches that could draw in traffic to your site.
In addition, placing a strong emphasis on image optimization will help readers that have visited your site find content.
We’ll be assuming that you know how to insert images and add appropriate tags, as follows:
<a href="Image Link" title="Title of Website"><img src="URL of Image" alt="Description, Keywords" width="300" height="200"></a>
Keywords
An image isn’t a word. When inserting an image into one of your posts, don’t think that you must leave references to the original image. You can, but that won’t do you, your readers, or new visitors, any good. You have to think about several keywords that can describe the image. Most likely, you have generated the image based on what you have been writing about in the post. Possibly, the same keywords that you have been using within the post can be applied to the image.
Be generous when it comes to adding keywords to your images. They should, ideally, be placed within the alt tag, indicating what the images is. The text can then be used by search engines to analyze what the image is, and may be placed into the images area of the results.
Captions
WordPress has a built-in caption service that makes it easy to add captions to images. Captions are typically not added to images, as the alt tag suffices as a way to label images without adding any additional text to the main portion of your page.
For SEO, captions can help your readers properly determine what an image is representing, especially for smaller images that you might not have a larger source file for. They are generally placed beneath the image.
Nearby Text
Like the caption, text nearby the image can improve the image’s ranking for certain keywords. While you shouldn’t align the image too close to other text, keeping this in mind will potentially increase the number of keywords associated with the image.
Link Text and Title
Images that are linking to other sites, using the a href tag shouldn’t be ignored, either. You can link the image back to the page that you are placing the image on and your ranking for that page will increase as a result of more “incoming” links and additional keywords within the content. The title of the link could reference the title of the post.
Other Factors
Using a fast-loading, semi-compressed image will benefit you as it will decrease the load time of your page and it won’t take as long for search engines to index your content.
Remember that JPG and PNG images are the fastest loading and are generally the main formats found in the images pages of search engines. The GIF format should be limited to animations and smaller images.
The size of the image should be placed into the image code in order for browsers to render the image more quickly and this will further lead to a more likely chance that the image gets placed high within image results.
Concluding Thoughts
Optimizing your images for the web should become common and one of the first things you do when placing images into your content. Relevant and keyword-related images can greatly increase the number of visitors to your blog, even if they might not be looking for your content.
They are a hidden aspect to SEO that can add keywords to your content – just don’t overstuff them and you will be on your way to creating a blog with more relevant search results and more visitors.
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Hmm..i’ve do all of these.. But Off-Page SEO is also important.
Off-Page SEO ?? do you mean the backlinks and others such?? this image optimization is really important to increase SEO value of your pages and get better ranking for images in the search engines.
SEO is pretty much devided into on-page optimization and off-page optimization. It is important to both have trafiic directed to your site, and then for it to flow easily through your site. Both of these have to be adressed in ewffective SEO.
Thats a fantastic article.. I have done tremendous amount of hard work in promoting my website but I never thought of SEO for images. So according to you, we should place our keywords in the ALT tag sounds really interesting. Lets try this one out.
Ya you need to try this but one thing if you are wandering to generate more traffic to your blog optimizing the images then make sure that you have images of such things on your blogs that are frequently searched.
Even if not, at least you after applying these things you can make your post more standard and suitable for search engines.
Thanks a lot Pradeep for the excellent feedback.. By the way, mine is not a blog. Its a full fledged website. I wil try to incorporate ur suggestions..
I have one more question. Any suggestions on how to attract visitors from a particular country? Like I am targeting more people from United States. Any suggestions for the same?
Adwords, facebook ads & opther geo-targeted endeavours, targeted at your specific geopgraphic locale – The US in this instance.
These have been great tips for the optimisation of images. Including keywords in the alt tags really helps as they describe what the picture is and the search engine crawlers also become aware about that….Thanks for these awesome tips…
nice post michael,
I personally prefer mainly two techniques
1) name of the image
2) image alt tag
this is working great to achieve rankings for your image.
sometimes I forget to include the size and width of the image in HTML tag and often leave it by default and apparently it’s very influenced to the SEO.
thanks for the interesting article.
it’s verry nice article.. that I will learn SEO.. thanl you verry much
I use this technique for may years now and I am getting lots of traffic from it, especially from Google Image search.
Good to read one more articles of SEO.
Well, the ALT tags and the captions are the best way to optimize the images for SEO but i think you considered more on generating traffic through Image optimization in this post.
BTW One more benefit of using the ALT tags is that it provides an alternative for when people browse the Web with images turned off (rarely but mostly in mobiles) or when those browsers are using screen reading software.
Its obvious that the search bots dont recognize the images so they have to depend on the text and so for instance, the image gallery blogs should really need to focus on this as they have less content on their pages. Its equally essential that you follow proper format such as using ALT tags for images in order to have your post ranked higher in the search engines.
SEO is always interesting to learn, especially for me who actually want to increase page rank and indexed by google that. thank you has to share about this lesson. I will try to use this when I use the images in the posting.
I’ve been getting a few visitors from image searches, I was a bit confused at first as the referring URL was so long and my tracking (statpress) recorded the search time as something odd.
Dont forget about the Alt Tag folks. Search engine spiders can not see images like us humans do, and the trick is to tell them what the image is all about via the Alt Tag. Painting a picture with words, so to speak…..
I agree with Jacques..Search engines are definitely blind for images and to get better search rankings/tell the search engines about the images, we need to use ALT tag as Michael also said..
Hi! Great post about the importance of including images for SEO. Until now I’ve usually been focused on text on my sites. I did notice great results once when I hosted my images on Flickr. I put my keywords in the image titles and the link below the images and it worked great. Thanks so much! -David
I do not even suspect that the images affect the SEO. I have always been convinced that the only relevant text.
for wordpress blog SEO optimization, I believe the easiest to use, great plugin is All-in-one-SEO
you can search the plugin within your wp-admin, plugins, add new
There is a simple wordpress plugin to do this.. Called SEO for images.. I use it it gives good results..
Hi.. I’m so nyubi (newbie), so far I’m not using in my post, coz I’m still learn things like thist
google images is a tough one to crack, i haven’t seen many people discussing it really, guess it isn’t that profitable
I am looking for this for a long time. Thanks very much.
search engine optimization service that will help improve business while at the same time not break my budget. My products are swords, daggers and knives. We do very well on point of sale transactions.
The best way I have found to increase my search engine ranking is by buying expired domains that already have a good page rank and setting up a simple content site with a link to my real site.
I do not even suspect that the images affect the SEO. I have always been convinced that the only relevant text.
yes