Generate Traffic With Google Images
Images play a key role in a website. They give additional appeal to a particular web page. They are also a factor in generating more traffic to a website and increasing page rank. At present, many website marketers use pictures in optimizing the website as well as optimizing the images itself for Google Image Searches.
How does this work? The images that are uploaded onto a website are tagged or labelled and this is used by search engines like Google to determine the relevance of the picture to the searches made. Of course it is not that simple. There are other criteria that need to be considered for the total optimization of the images in a webpage.
There are many ways to optimize an image so it would be more likely to be included in Google Image Search result. One very important thing to do is to include keywords or phrases in the image’s Alt text (alt=”keywords here”). Using keywords is a great SEO strategy that could likewise be used for images. Be sure to put key words to your alt text and these keywords should be relevant to the image and to the whole website.
Optimization also entails including keyword enriched title tags and meta tags. SEO specialists know that tags play a big role in the optimization of a particular website. So you need to ensure that the pictures, the title tags and the meta tags contain similar keywords. This would help make the picture rank better in image searches.
The file name of the image also needs to be considered when optimizing images for image searches. Decriptive texts that have the targeted keyword should be used as the title for the picture. Also make sure that this keyword is higly relevant to what the picture is. For example, you would be putting pictures of kitchen designs.The file name should be “kitchen-designs.jpg” instead of usual picture file names that are a combination of letters and numbers like “IMG-0001.jpg”.
The image location in the web page should also be thought through. Ideally, an image should be put in the middle of the text. It would also help if descriptive texts containing the chosen keyword are placed before or after the image.
Another helpful tip is to use the webmaster tools from Google. There are image specific tools there that can be used by anyone. Click on the ‘enhanced picture search’. This could be found in the Diagnostics page. Don’t forget to tick the check box on that page to opt in the picture search on Google. Webmaster Tools can also be used to monitor the images indexed by search engines in a website. Being aware of the number of pictures in your site that is indexed by search engines is important so necessary changes can be made to increase the traffic to the image.
Keeping the picture fresh by changing it every now and then is also helpful. Especially when the website focuses on topics that are highly popular, try not to have the same images in the site for long. Changing the original pictures and putting up new pictures that are relevant to the key words you have chosen will refresh the images’ rank in the picture search.
Making sure that the images in the web site comply with the Google Images’ standards is also essential. Key points to consider would be the width, height, atl tag and title tag of the picture. All these elements should be within the parameters of the search engine.
Apart from the above mentioned methods, many other steps can be taken to optimize your images for the image searches. Following these steps will help in increasing the number of visitors viewing the images as well as the website itself.