5 ways to optimize images for best search engine rankings and to improve traffic
Images play a vital role in an entire appearance of a
website. Yeah it is an accepted truth. But importance of images are not limited
to the appearance itself. We can actually improve our traffic, search results
and rankings just by optimizing the images on our site. When I said about
optimizing images, it doesn’t mean improving our images just visually. It means
to optimize our images in a way that, they are recognizable and found by even
the robots and crawlers of the search engines also. If they are visually
appealing then, that is a great thing. But having images that are optimized for
SEO is a best thing to happen for a webmaster or a blogger.
So how do we optimize an image or how do we make an
optimized image ? There are actually 5 ways to optimize an image to improve
rankings and search results i.e SEO.
In this article, i’m going to explain you about those 5 ways
to optimize the images for SEO.
Name of the Image
Always try to name an image in a meaningful way. And also
remember that an image’s name should be similar to that of article’s title. For
example, the title of this article is 5 ways to optimize images for best search
engine rankings and to improve traffic. So that name of an image should be like
“Ways-to-optimize-images” or “optimizing-images-for-better-seo-and-
traffic”. I’m sure that you already got it. So, let’s move
onto the next part.
Alt and Title tags
Alt and title tags are like the heart of an image, if it
wants to be optimized for SEO. It is also recommended to maintain the alt and
title tags similar to the title of the article, just like the above discussed
method. But you don’t need to use the ‘--’ as we have used to name the image
file above.
Size of the Image
Always try to make the size of the image less. I’m not
talking about resolution here. I’m talking about the actual size of the image
like bits, Mbs etc..; If the images are straight out of your digital cameras,
then they will be having huge sizes. it is not recommended to upload them
directly on to your. Using plugins like smush.it on wordpress and using various
web services , anyone can reduce the size of an image without losing it’s cool.
Image format
There are like more than 6 image formats (may be more). But
the ones you need to use always are jpeg and png. These two formats are
recommended by even Google. So ignore the weird ones and always go for png or
jpeg
Image Sitemap
The last one is to add a sitemap for the images on your
site. You can do that in the Google Webmasters tool. If you are new to Google
Webmasters Tool, then follow our guide Google
Webmasters Tool 101.
That’s all for now. If you want to know more about SEO tips
and tricks and how to improve your site’s traffic and rankings, then please
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