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Why You Simply Must SEO Your Images

By Brankica on February 23rd, 2012. Posted in Search Engines Tagged in Search Engines

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When people hear about significance of optimising their content for search engines, they usually think of doing SEO for their posts (articles). However, SEO is much more than just optimising your text content.

Optimising images is often as important as optimising the text of the post. The process isn’t complicated at all and will not require additional keyword research on your part. But skipping this step will keep you from getting some serious traffic.

If you are not using images in your posts, start now. Even if you think your topic can not possibly have an image attached to it, there is always a way to make it happen.

If there isn’t a perfect image that explains the topic as soon as you lay your eyes on it, at least use a funny image that will warm people up before they start reading. Just make it “half way” related to the post.

I don’t even have to tell you why it is so important to have images in posts, maybe you should see it for yourself. This is a screenshot of a site in pet industry (not dogs, not cats) with its top 21 traffic sources (it is all I could fit in the screenshot).
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As you can see, 5 out of top 21 sources are image related.

5.75% of visits in this screenshot is organic traffic from search engines that came from image searches!

That is 4.052 visits in one month, just from optimising the images on the site!

So how much work will this take?

Hardly any additional work! Start by writing a post with a keyword in mind. Find an appropriate image for the post. Rename it using the keyword you are targeting in the post (make sure the image has something to do with it).

So if you have a recipe site and you are writing a post about “chocolate cherry cake”, that is how you will name your image. As I said, make sure the image is actually of a chocolate cherry cake.

So let’s say you buy an image from a stock photo site. It will usually have some long un-optimised name. I often buy them from Fotolia.com and the file is usually named something like fotolia_25779433_27158621_XXL. Not even close to optimised. In this case, change the file name to “chocolate cherry cake”.

Use the same keyword as an ALT tag of the image.

It is even better to target long tail keywords with these images. They will rank even higher on search engines with no additional work apart from this basic SEO. One of the reasons is that most of the people on the internet are too lazy to do any optimisation so they simply don’t optimise their images.

Another thing you can notice when you go to Google Image Search for example, is that some more specific topics don’t bring a lot of good and targeted results. So if some of your posts (or even the whole site) are related to one of those topics, this is a great opportunity to rank your images to the top of the image results.

This is one field not many blog/site owners are in yet. I am not sure why, but that screenshot is the proof how big the image related traffic can be. Don’t miss on this opportunity and if you can’t rank great for some competitive keywords, maybe image search will be your back door way in to the top search engine rankings.

Comments (8)

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    Paul Salmon

    Posted on February 23rd, 2012

    Optimizing images for SEO isn’t something I thought about when I started blogging. While I know about the ALT tag, I did used that tag for readability. It wasn’t until I started getting traffic from search engines because of my images that I realized the traffic potential from images on my blog.

    I now ensure I take the time to properly optimize my images for SEO.

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      Joe

      Posted on February 24th, 2012

      Hi Paul,

      Accessibility is of course very important. And is why the ALT tag was indeed created for those who are visually impaired and need screen readers to help hear an audio version of the pages. And also for those with slow internet connections where the ALT text loads before the images does. As a rule of thumb I tend to lend to accessibility first where I use a descriptive ALT tag but add a twist of relevancy wherever I can in a meaningful way to help boost SEO too.

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    Aisling Nelson

    Posted on February 23rd, 2012

    Thanks – I am very interested in this topic. Could you advise whether to break the words up with underscore or can you leave spaces?

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      Joe

      Posted on February 23rd, 2012

      Hi Aisling,

      Thanks for dropping by. For ALT tags text it’s normal to break up with spaces. For filenames, you can use underscores but dashes are preferred.

      Hope that helps…

      Joe

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        Aisling Nelson

        Posted on February 24th, 2012

        > Thanks for your reply Joe – so as an example –
        vintage flower photography.jpg?

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          Joe

          Posted on February 29th, 2012

          That looks like an image name which is a little different to ALT text. Images filenames are normally separated by dasshes (-). You can read more about examples here: www.seotraining.org.uk/blog/image-optimisation

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    Adarsh Thampy

    Posted on February 24th, 2012

    Joe,

    Great article.

    One thing I wanted to ask you. Have you checked the bounce rate of these visitors?

    I had a site which received over 10K visitors a month and the bounce rate was almost 98%.

    Very few people landed on the content page. I guess people who are interested in image search don’t really care for the content or they were there just to use the image for their site (A lot of people use Google images to find images for using on their own site)

    P.S: For those who do use image search, you can end up with copyright issues. So don’t do it!

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      Joe

      Posted on February 24th, 2012

      Credit goes to Brankica for the post. But thanks for the comment.

      I think you are right Adarsh. We get a fair lick of image traffic for ‘Welsh flag’ because I did a Welsh translation for SEOBook’s Blogger’s guide, and the image used often ranks in the top 5 results. The bounce rate is very high but you have to put it in context and although the traffic in that case isn’t that useful it’s not harmful either, and is getting your brand/website better known. Plus the more relevant the traffic the better, and image optimisation helps your overall ‘traditional’ on-page SEO too. So lots of wins.

      And you’re right on being careful using images from search engines for your blog or website. You can do it but ensure they are ‘creative common images’ where the license allows you to use them for free. Here’s a useful link for that:
      googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/find-creative-commons-images-with-image.html

      Reply

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