IMAGE SEARCH FOR SEO

No-one wants to read dense blocks of text, and images not only break up these blocks, but create visual appeal to your website.  Google image searches also attract more hits than any other independent search engine and their potential for directing traffic to your website is therefore enormous.  However, these benefits will quickly be wiped out if you do not correctly utilise the power of image search.  These helpful tips will ensure you avoid rudimentary mistakes and use image indexing to its fullest, making it work effectively for you. 

The most crucial point is to ensure the image filenames and names are always very descriptive.  Avoid a generic name; for example, if you sell pizza, make sure your images are named ‘MyCompany’s Pizza’ instead of simply ‘Pizza’.  Even then, a few extra keywords are always welcome – try to mention your product’s best features in the keywords, like how delicious they are or their low price.  This will ensure you rank highly for these keywords when these are searched for.  Images also have alt and titles tags – you should make use of these for the same purpose.

Image formats and sizes are also an important factor.  Ensure you use a standard web image type, such as JPEG, PNG or GIF, not only to ensure that your images are viewable with any computer setup, but also to prevent Google skipping over your proprietary image formats.  For this reason you should also avoid embedding images as a part of Flash controls.  As for size, you need to ensure your images are large enough to see the detail in, but not so large that they take time to load on the average connection.  Even with modern superfast broadband, a webpage with several multi-megabyte images will slow to a crawl, and perhaps lead users to go elsewhere.

It is important to ensure your images are left permanently on your website, whether or not you end up removing them from the page they were originally on.  The reason for this is that Google will retain the index to these images, and users will be frustrated by ‘file not found’ errors if you remove them.

Lastly, make use of modern services like Google’s image labeller.  This feature allows users to tag images with relevant keywords.  In a similar vein, think very carefully about how you place your images on the page.  The page needs to be keyword-rich, especially so around the images you want associated with your web presence. 

Once you have taken all these precautions, when Google’s image bot reaches your website, it will be able to deduce the purpose and relevance of the images on your website far more accurately.  Your notability on the web will be improved by the extra traffic from Google image searches, and this will lead to increased traffic to your website and, ultimately, more profit for your business or organisation.