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How to Optimise Images for Search Engines

By Brankica on February 27th, 2012. Posted in Search Engines Tagged in Search Engines

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Optimising your content for search engines, no matter what type of content are we talking about, is essential for getting the free traffic everyone is after.

One of the content types you can and most definitely should optimise are images in your posts. Optimised images get ranked high in search engines, bringing waves of free traffic to your site.

How to optimise images in a WordPress blog?

Optimising an image in a WordPress blog will be very easy, even if you are beginner. Start by renaming the image while it is still on your computer. Rename it by giving it a name you will use as your keyword in the post.

Let’s say it is an image of a BMW 320 vehicle for your car blog. But the image file name is car320bmwsmall.jpg. Rename it to the keyword you are targeting on the page, let’s say it would be “red BMW 320″, so the name would be red-BMW-320.jpg. Upload it to your blog post.

When you upload an image into a WordPress blog, you will have several text fields to fill out:

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As you see, there are several fields to fill out. So using the example above, this is how you will fill out the fields:

Title: red BMW 320

Alternate text: red BMW 320

Caption: you don’t have to fill this in, but you can use the same keyword – red BMW 320

Description: image of a red BMW 320

Link URL: leave empty, unless you have to give credit to the image author, in that case link to the credits page.

Extra tip: if your post is selling something and the image is a part of the offer or review, link the image to the offer. People often click on images.

Chose alignment and size of the image and Insert into Post.

Filling out all these fields will optimise your image for search engines and the most important thing you need to do is to make sure that the image and this SE information are accurate. So, although you can put the same “red BMW 320″ info on a photo of a dog, that will make your visitors unhappy (since you tricked them) and they will click out fast, which results in Google recognizing something is wrong.

In case you are not using WordPress, there is a way for you to optimise your images as well.

How to optimise images in plain HTML?

Here is a code you can use to insert the image into your HTML site page with the elements you will need to optimise.

<img title="image title" src="/img/spacer.gif">

You need to edit this code for your site, and the only part you will be editing is the part between the quotation marks.

In the title= part of the code, add the image title. That it the text people will see when they hover over your image.

In the src="/img/spacer.gif"> part of the code add the URL where the image is located.

The partย alt= should contain your keywords as this is most important for SEO (it is best to make alt and title the same).

Always include the width and height of the image because it makes it easier for browsers to read the size of the image and even if the image is broken, they will display an empty space of the same size.

Now that you know how to optimise your images for search engines, it is time to see why you should do it and how big traffic you can get from only a few moments of extra work.

About the author: Brankica Underwood is a social media sharp shooter and online business coach, helping you build your online business.

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