3 Ways to Optimize Images For Better SEO And Increasing Traffic

All webmasters and bloggers want to increase website traffic day by day. For this, they write better articles along with following various SEO tips and social media sharing. Social media and search engines are good sources of traffic. So blogger target readers by writing good content with proper SEO. But many of those bloggers ignore the images. Google images is also a good source of traffic and I see hundreds of visits daily from Google Images. When I started getting traffic. I was happy to see my blog’s growth in Google images. It also encouraged me to optimize my images for Google images. Like me, very few bloggers take care of the images the same as they do for the content. Very few know that images can also be a good source of traffic and never think of Image SEO. If you optimize website images properly, you can get the traffic from various image search engines. In this post, We will see how Image SEO can be done and how it can increase a website’s search engine traffic.

When I started getting traffic from Google Images, I was happy to see my blog’s growth. It also encouraged me to optimize my images for Google images and I managed to get better results. There are various factors which affect the image SEO. In this post, We will see how Image SEO can be done and how it can increase a website’s search engine traffic.

Ways to Optimize Images to Increase Traffic

Follow these simple Image SEO tips to optimize website images to increase website traffic.

1. Proper Alt in image tags

ALT and Title are the two most important things. ALT is an attribute of the image tag. The Text which we write in ALT is shown at the place of the image if the image is not available when the connection is slow. It is also indexed by the search engines as the main keyword for the image. When someone searches for a word in the image search engines, ALT plays a main role in the image ranking. So the use of proper ALT in image tags can increase your image search engine visibility which will surely attract some good amount of traffic.

The title attribute is shown as the tooltip when you hover over the element. In the case of an image button, you can use the call to action. Each image on the page must have an ALT and TITLE.

ALT is required but the title is not. Still, it is a good practice if you are using both.

<img src="bmw-x1.jpg" alt="BMW X1" title="BMW X1 car" />

If you use WordPress you get the option to add title and ALT before inserting an image into the blog post. See the snapshot below.

2. Use descriptive name

Always use proper keywords in the image names. Suppose you are writing a post about the Google Panda, then make sure use the name Google-panda.jpg or something which contains Google panda keyword. This can improve image visibility in the search results. Most of the CMS use some random numbers in place of the proper name, so make sure change the name to get most of your images. Although, Google is now smarter and can scan the content inside the image. But many other search engines still rely on the image name. So, we should always take care of the image name.

Also read: How to Optimize a blog post for a Keyword or Phrase

3. File Size

File Size is an important factor and you should not ignore this. Page load time matters and Google give it a priority in the ranking. So, you must try to compress the image before uploading on your website. There are various image optimization tools.

If you use WordPress, you can use the image optimization plugins to optimize your older images. But for new images, you should start using the compression process before you upload the image.

Not just size compression, you can also consider reducing the dimensions for better results.

Final Words

You can also add a descriptive caption to the image. And try to add the keyword text in the image if possible. Search engines can read the text inside images and give this text more priority than the text in the name and the ALT. This can not be applied to all the images but try your best to fit some keywords as a text on the image.

If you are a WordPress user, you can try WordPress Plugin For SEO Friendly images. It works good and adds all the things needed for SEO automatically. It adds ALT text based on the pattern you selected in the settings.

Images are an important part of your website and must use with each post you do. But you should not avoid Image SEO and try to optimize website images as much as you can. If you are not taking care of the image optimization, you are losing a good amount of traffic for sure.