Image SEO – How it Can Help Your Google SEO
Image SEO is sometimes overlooked when optimising a website but Google Image Search has become an important referrer to drive traffic to your website. Google Images indexes billions of images and if your image can be found for the right keyword, then you will get targeted visitors to your website.
Depending on the search query, Google displays several images above the regular search results. The images can be found at the top of the search results and they are linked to web pages. If someone clicks on the image, the person will be taken to the web page that shows the image.
Research shows that image counts when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation so here are ten image SEO tips to take you to the top of Google Search Engine results.
Quality images: Having quality images on your website will have more click appeal and draw people to your website. There is also an advantage to displaying original images rather than stock photos or images supplied by a public relations company. The more control you have over your images on your website the better.
File names: Use a file name that reflects the content of the page so if you are writing about image SEO and you want to include an image, use a file name like image-seo.jpg. Words should always be separated by a hyphen rather than an underscore as these are read by the search engines as spaces.
File extension: The file extension image is important. If the image search engine sees a “.jpg” (JPEG) file extension, it’s going to assume that the file is a photo.
Alt text: The alt text used to describe the image should also use the keywords that you are using to target the page. In this example, the image text would be ‘Image SEO’.
Link Anchor Text: As with alt text, if you’re linking to your images using text, use good anchor text that describes the contents of the image.
Accompanying text: The post or text below should deal with the same topic as the image or describe it. Google will weigh the surrounding text heavily when determining what the picture is about. Be sure to place relevant keywords above and below the image you are optimising.
Avoid duplicate content: Avoiding duplicate content on your site is just as important for image SEO. If for example, you have a thumbnail and a full size image, you don’t want these to all be indexed. Use a robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the images you don’t want indexed.
Size matters: Research shows that bigger images seem to get featured more often on Google’s first result page. Include the width and height attributes in your image tag to show search engines the size of the image.
File organisation: Create an image folder on your web server space that’s accessible to the search engines. Do not exclude robots from your graphic images directory or limit search engine access to graphic-image files. One common mistake web developers make is putting their ‘click to see larger image’ inside of a JavaScript link which limits Search Engines’ access to that image file.
Optimise the page with the image: Optimising the page the image appears on is just as important as optimising the image itself. Optimising the page for contextual search has an influence on the Google Images Search. Search engines also look at text surrounding a graphic image to determine relevancy.
Image SEO should be an important part of your Google SEO to drive traffic to your website. However, you want to make sure visitors referred by Google Image are quality targeted visitors and increase your sales conversions and the Revenue Per Online Visit (RevPOV) so it is important to evaluate how optimising for image search fits into your overall web strategy.
