There are many ways to make an article more engaging to your readers. Using lovely images is one of the best ways to do this. Although you may not realize it, images can generate a ton of traffic from image-based search engines such as Google Images. For this to happen, you need to optimize your images for SEO. Fortunately, it is much easier than you think once you get the hang of it. This article provides inside secrets of optimizing images for better search engine rankings.
First, you need to choose images related to the text of the articles on your website. This is crucial from a user experience point of view. In fact, you don’t want to baffle your readers with a bad choice of images. They need to be of reasonable quality with the correct resolution and large enough to be visible across numerous devices. The best way to get unique photos is to get out there and take them yourself or pay a photographer to take images for you. This way you are safe of any copyright issues down the line. But if you lack time and resources to do that – there are plenty of free resources out there.
Google Image Search (Usage Rights) is an excellent resource to get free images that are labeled for reuse. To find these images – Go to Google Images – Click on Search Tools – Usage Rights and select Labeled for Reuse. Flickr is another great resource to find free images. In fact, you can use any image on Flickr that is labeled with a Creative Commons license. Unsplash is another resource where all images are copyright free. The only thing you need to do is credit and link to the photographer when using the image.
Best Practices For Image Optimization
Although your readers may recognize what’s going on in an image as soon as he or she sees it, the search engine spiders are not in a position to understand the content of an image at this point. This is why you need to help the search engine spiders understand what’s in a picture with “alt text.” This short description (alt text) will help the search engines understand the images. It is best to use a variation of your main keyword as the alt text for better SEO.
File size is also important for better image optimization. You need to make the image size as small as possible without sacrificing the quality of the image. You may already know that page load times matter for SEO. Many free tools are available to make a large image smaller. Image Optimizer and Picnik are two of the best in this regard. One mistake most people make is, they let the browser resize a large picture to look smaller. When you use a large image that was resized by inputting the height and width tags, your reader loads the large image first, and the browser then resizes it. This is why you need to use an image editor to resize the desired image and then upload that image onto your website or blog.
The file name you save the image is important for SEO. Choose a descriptive file name that you want the image to rank. Use a variation of the primary keyword as the file name for your image. This helps to better optimize the image for SEO.
Captions and descriptions are the other important factors to consider when optimizing your images for SEO. Although there is no correlation between search engine rankings and image captions right now, captions are necessary to reduce the bounce rates. Low bounce rates are important for better search engine rankings. Image captions are well-read similar to good headlines, and they can significantly help reduce your bounce rates. So, if you don’t use image captions, you are losing a good chance to lower the bounce rate of your page.
In conclusion, people spend hours crafting the perfect post for their website. But they miss out on the chance of optimizing their images for maximum search engine advantages. If you are one of them, the aforementioned tips reveal how to optimize your images for better search engine rankings.
