How to Make Your Images Pull Their SEO Weight
No matter how much we experiment, we cannot disprove that images are supercharged traffic magnets. We have tried our best to disprove this notion since it seems silly that Google would allocate such an uneven weight to the search engine friendliness of images, but the fact is that images are very search engine friendly.
Use Original Images
If you upload an original image to your web page, and it is a good quality image, then Google will give it priority on the Google Images search engine. It is also more likely to appear on the regular search engine results in the section where it shows the picture options.
Using Purchased Images
The thing about purchased images is that they fit your topic perfectly, and they are great quality. This means that people are more likely to find the images in relation to your primary keywords, but you will have to compete with the other people who have the same image. However, this is not always a bad thing because Google doesn’t seem to prioritize one over another. Your image sits beside blue-chip company branded images as if you had the same authority.
Social Media is Your Friend
Sharing your posts and websites on social media is a great idea, especially if your web page has an image. The image is often what sells the page, and thanks to social media, images are getting far more attention than ever before. This means that sharing your web pages on social media without an image is making it more difficult for your web page to do well on social media.
Apps Use Images All the Time
There are hundreds of apps that sort through images and pick them out in order to send people to their host pages. They do it for a number of reasons, from picking out funny images, to showing off products. The weird thing is that your image may rank at the bottom with Google and Bing, but rides high on an app.
Set Some Images to Copyright Free
If you want to rank highly without question, then learn how to set your images to “Labeled for reuse” on Google. Not only will you rank higher in general, you will also rank higher on the “Labeled for reuse” section of the Google tool. Plus, apps and online tools will pick up your images and use them, so make sure you have your products, mascot or branding on them.
Title and Alt Tags
Follow this advice very closely. When you save your image to your computer, name it something descriptive. When you upload, use that same saved name as your image title. Then, describe what is in the image, and maybe its meaning, in the ALT tag.
This is the search engine friendliness trifecta when it comes to images, and it covers all your bases from the search engine bots to web spiders to app crawling software to social media sharing.
Conclusion – People Are Searching Using Images
Can’t find a song, or a part in a movie, or even a celebrity, then type something vaguely reminiscent in the Google images search engine and see which images represent what you want. This is what people are doing on a massive scale, from trying to figure out where they saw somebody on TV, to finding the jacket they saw last week and couldn’t remember the name of it.
