Search Optimization School

Do you take advantage of image SEO? I mean, are images part of your SEO plan to get additional traffic for your web site? Do you use them to your advantage? When used properly, images can be a great SEO friendly tool.

Image SEO

Let’s say you have an article you’re posting, and you’ve optimized the title and the content for SEO. You’ve chosen some great keywords, used the appropriate categories and tags, and now you’re ready to publish it. Does the article contain an image? Did you use that image to your SEO advantage?

Google uses more than 200 ranking signals when indexing content, and the more signals you can influence with items in your article – the better.

There are 2 things you should know:

1. Images can help determine relevance
2. Images can be their own source of traffic

First of all, find or create an image (respecting copyrights of course) to use with your post. Save it to your desktop and change the file name to that of your target keywords. If your post is about “image seo” then the file name should be something like “image-seo.jpg”.

Insert that image in your post somewhere near the top of the page, I usually do it after the first few sentences or the first paragraph. When you insert the image give it both an alt and title tag “image seo”. Now you have the trifecta, the file name, and alt and title tag are the same as your target keyword phrase for the article. You’ve used the image to boost the relevance of your page in search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, one thing that you may not have known is, you’ve setup the image with it’s own filename based SEO keywords, and now the google image search crawler is going to pick that up and index it for google image search. You would be surprised how much traffic this can bring. I’ve had pages that ranked #1 in google image search for the picture, that brought visitors to the site that way – and I made all my money from monetization that way, rather than traditional search.

Case and point, I have an image indexed for furniture on another site, and for some reason people were searching for an image of what they wanted so they could see it and try to figure out what they wanted. Then they would click through, read the full post – and buy. This won’t work for all sites, but it sure will for many!

Using images to boost SEO is a solid practice, and something you should be using at all times in your site. If not, you’re just throwing some opportunities away!