A great way to get additional traffic to your site is to apply SEO to your images. Sure, the traffic may not be the best qualified as the majority of the visitors who come to your site from image optimization are looking for the image in greater detail but you will get visitors who will engage with your site and sign up for your newsletter, purchase a product, download a white paper, or fill out a lead form. Either way it is traffic that you would not have gotten if you did not have your images optimized.
But let’s assume your site is a retail site and you have thousands of product pages and images to sell. This is where the power of image SEO really kicks in and can totally boost your sales and profits.
So, how do you go about scooping up all this image search traffic?
Fortunately for us, Google has done a nice job laying out all the general tips and tricks.
Here are the highlights, which culminates as the four keys to image search optimization success:
- Create detailed, informative file names. I love to use the product name and/or NDC or model number. If you upload images from your camera, they are often named things like: img00234.JP and this will not work. You are going to need to name it the term you want to rank for so. A better option would be something like: TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.jpg.jpg
- Create detailed, informative image alt tags. With our products, you might say something like: <img src=” TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.jpg ” alt=”
TaylorMade Burner SuperFast “>.Now don’t get greedy and keyword stuff your ALT tags. Do that and you will be considered SPAM and your images will not be indexed. I suggest you go after one keyword phrase and be happy with that. - Create detailed, informative anchor text. Anchor text (the text pages use to link to your site) gives the search engines a clear understanding of where they’re about to go. So, if our HP Ink Cartridge page had a link to it from another page on your site, you might link to it like this: <a href=” TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.html”> TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299 </a>. Nothing new here, just good ole SEO.
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Create clear context for your image. Google mentioned this and says:
“Wherever possible, it’s a good idea to make sure that images are placed near the relevant text. In addition, we recommend providing good, descriptive titles and captions for your images”. Most people do not know how to use the title attribute for images so let me give it to you with our example:
<img src=” TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.jpg ” alt=”
TaylorMade Burner SuperFast ” title=” TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.jpg” >
Now add a caption to the image you have created the perfect image optimization desert!
Let’s take a look at a great example of Image search engine optimization at golf.com:
TaylorMade Burner SuperFast
If we look at the HTML code we will see exactly how the image is optimized:
<img width=”299″ height=”224″ alt=”TaylorMade Burner SuperFast” src=”golf/i/equipment/2010/01/TaylorMade-Burner-Superfast-Driver_299.jpg“/> <div class=”caption”> <div class=”text”>TaylorMade Burner SuperFast</div>
Hats off to golf,com as it does not get any better than what they have done and it pays off big for them with a top image search placement for the term “Taylormade Burner SuperFast”.
google image search taylormade burner superfast
So get started today and drive traffic from image search engine optimization.
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