Most bloggers and website designers put value more on optimized text, but SEO optimized image helps boost your page ranking and create more traffic to your website. Here are some tips on how to use your web images to draw traffic and to make them SEO friendly :
Search for unique images
Visitors are easily enticed on a website with appropriate images, but unique ones will always get the edge. Just like for a fresh content, people are always looking for new images.
Place your images above content
Correct positioning puts more value to your image which gives a greater visibility to the visitors.
Use appropriate image file size .
File Size for faster loading of a web page is one of the most important factor that a web designer should consider. The
speed of the Internet connection may vary in every visitor especially
coming from different countries and in most cases, visitors do not want to wait for the loading of the pages. If
your type of website requires a lot of images, make sure that every
image is reduced without sacrificing the image resolution.
Use high-quality resolution images
When you look at a webpage with an image, we usually look for clarity. Which means the visitors should see clearly what message it conveys and how it is related to the content. Provide a hyperlinked larger image version of the smaller one if necessary.
Filename of the image should be keyword SEO friendly
Whenever we searched an image from the
Internet like in search engines such as Google and Bing, we never
realized how these search engines were able to find those images.
To make it SEO friendly, assign specific filename from the SEO keywords on the title. If your image is coming from your own camera, it normally creates a default filename (example : DSC01227.jpg), make sure that you change the filename before uploading.
Another detail to consider is when creating two words on a filename, using a dash symbol “-“ will make your image more of a target instead of using underscore “_”. Search engines reads the dash symbol as space.
Use captions to your images
Search engines gets their results from tags, filenames, and captions to identify and properly index images. Captions are text that best describe the image in relation to the text or content.
Recommended file formats for web SEO
The three most common image file formats
for web are JPEG (Joint Photographic Expert Group), PNG (Portable
Network Graphics), and GIF (Graphics Interchange Format). These image formats are widely compatible with recent browsers. But when it comes to image SEO, recommended formats in exact order : PNG, JPEG, then GIF.
The next time you put an image to your
blog or website, it is advisable to focus not only on the appearance and
placing of the images, but also how to make your images an SEO target.
Also published in Factoidz with the same author.
