10+ Images Optimization Tips for Search Engine Traffic

Along with blog post traffic from search engines its also mandatory to get traffic from your blog post images from image search engines. Hence you must know SEO for images also. One good blogger can never ignore the importance of images and traffic to his blog from every field. I have also seen many blogs that gets majority of their traffic from images search results. Its a fact that images speaks more than words. So today I will teach you how to optimize your post images in a very good manner and drive quality traffic from it. To check your traffic coming from where, you can take help of Google Analytics. Enjoy!

Images Optimization Lessons for Beginner Bloggers:

1. Title and Alt Tag

This is one of the very important SEO factor. The image ALT tag is used to tell the robots about your image description. As usual robots crawl your images on the basis of ALT tag, they cannot understand image title. To include an ALT tag in your images, here is the example-

<img src=”car-racing.jpg” alt=”Car Racing” />

2. Use Targeted keywords in your ALT tag

Its must to add your popular and targeted keywords in your ALT tag. Use short and effective ALT tag to drive maximum traffic from search engines.

3. Avoid Special Symbols in describing your images

Never use samples and some special characters such as #, $, %, ^, &, *, !, +, _, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ? etc in image alt tag because people never search their images starting with that characters in use.

4. Use hyphens (-) instead of underscores ( _ )

Note: Hyphens are always better than underscores in SEO. So never use _ in your image Title and ALT tag. Prefer hyphens over underscores.

5. Robots.txt file

Always make sure that your robots.txt should permit search engines to read the images folder. The images folder should not be blocked by your robots.txt file. You can check my Robots.txt file for that.

6. WordPress plugins

There are so many WordPress plugins that comes under play to optimize your images for search engines. Some of the best 3 are:

1. SEO Friendly Images– Automatically Add ALT tag to your images.

2. WP Smush.it– This plugin optimize your images by reducing its size.

3. Google Images Redirect plugin– This plugin will help you get more visitors from Google Images Search by automatically redirecting to your blog when images opened.

7. Save you image in GIF or PNG format

To load your image faster in your blog and images search engine then its must to save your images in PNG or GIF format. Note- JPG format delivers you the best quality but they are heavy in size.

8. File Name

Always make a habit to use relevant file name. If you have a Car picture, the file name should be “Car”. If it is a red colour Car, then the file name should be “Red Car”. Its simple and I hope you all get understand it.

9. Images Hosting Matters

If you are not using WordPress, then I recommends you to choose a proper and suitable image hosting service such as Flickr. Its a fact that Flickr is believed to help Yahoo! image optimization.

10. Use caption for images

Placing a small caption directly under, on top or on the side of your image will help queue the search engines what the image is about. Helpful Hint: With a caption, you can be a little more descriptive about the picture than with the alt attribute.

11. Use Image Sitemaps

Always add image sitemaps to your Google webmaster tools for faster and proper crawling of your images just like your blog posts. Use WordPress plugin like WP images sitemaps to generate your image sitemaps.