A place in the top 3 search results of the most popular search engines (More specifically Google, people hardly care about the other search engines) for a specific keyword, it’s a dream of any webmaster. Different tried & tested methods are used, in addition to the new methodologies to rank a website. However, did you ever think that for what is this craziness over Search Engine position? The answer is simple, it’s traffic.
What if images can get you traffic? If you are confused, Google (The most desired and popular search engine) has an images search functionality and millions, if not billions of people worldwide use this to find relevant images. What if an image used in your website ranks at the top spot; isn’t it going to get you, new visitors? Now, traffic is equal to cash (Only if you know how to monetize your site though) and hence optimizing your website images along with the text content is of huge importance.
Importance of Image Optimization
Let’s take a look at image optimizing benefits first:
- A product or a business may be represented well by an image (if you know how to do it) than plain text.
- Most of the top search engines have dedicated options for image searching.
- Image optimization is a relatively newer trend and hence has fewer competitors.
How should the images be used?
Make sure that you only use high-resolution photographs. If it’s a physical product, try to get some snaps yourself or maybe, hire a professional photographer. Not only that you can use the images on your website, but, trying out photo-sharing sites such as Flickr or Picasa & social networking sites such as Twitter & Facebook can be a good idea. These are great resources when it comes to obtaining some highly targeted traffic.
Finding relevant images for your blog posts, however, can get tricky. You just cannot use a copyrighted image, at the same time; you want something related to your post. The solution is simple; you can buy stock or royalty-free images. The good thing is that you don’t need to spend a lot of bucks on this. Just Google it and you are bound to find some stock photo promotion code or think stock discount code.
The Image Optimization Technicalities
The most important attribute is probably the alt tag. It’s just like the keyword for a piece of content. It helps understand the search engines that what the image is all about and therefore rank it. You should understand that people hardly build links to images to make them rank; so more appropriate your alt tag is, the better are the chances of ranking (This is not a rule though; you never know what search engines think anyway)!
The second important aspect is, writing content that’s related to the image you use. For example, if you are talking about a specific household product, try to put pictures that relate to the product, if not images of the product itself.
Now, some further tips that will only enhance your chances of ranking images ahead of the competition:
- The image file name should be relevant, probably should contain the keywords for which you want to rank for.
- Use popular file extensions such as .jpg or .gif.
- Use the title attribute properly and put the image keyword in that along with some other words. So, if you want to rank an image for a baby sitter, make the title something like baby sitter photo or best baby sitter.
These tips in addition to your creativity can do wonders for the images you use in your website and can get you huge traffic. Now, how you use that traffic is a different story altogether!