Driving Traffic Through Image Optimization

If you observe Google results closely, you will notice that Google results bring in a lot of variation to its listings depending on the nature of information that you are looking for online. Google results are now a blend of various types of listings including results from regular websites, Google news, videos and images. In this post let us try to explore how to drive traffic to our websites through image optimization.

As Google is mixing up regular website listings with images in the universal search results, you will be able to increase your chances of driving more traffic to your website by getting your images listed in Google universal search results page. Google automatically pulls images of relevant objects for certain keywords. For example if you are searching for a popular tourist destination such as “Mauritius” Google pulls out a few images and lists them under the title “Images for Mauritius” alongside the other regular results.

If you have a travel website that is fighting hard to get top positions for the keyword “Mauritius”, may be here is a way to get to the first page of the search results. You must optimize your images in your Mauritius travel website to get the attention of the search engines. What you need to note here is that Google is listing the images of Mauritius without users having to use the keywords, “Mauritius images” or “Mauritius pictures” so if you optimize your image well you will be able to get your website listed in the first page. This again will be helpful in getting top rankings in the image searches. When people go specifically to image searches, your image optimization efforts will come in handy.

Here are few tips for optimizing your images. First of all give your images the right file names. Do not save your images as image-1, image-2, “header_img” etc., because all these file names do not tell the search engines anything specific about what is contained in the image. Unfortunately, even the most powerful search engine Google cannot interpret what is present in an image unless you tell them what is contained in the image. Choosing the right file name or descriptive file name is one of the best ways of telling the search engines what is contained in the images that you are using.

The next important factor to note is that you should make sure to add “alt” tag for your image. Remember to make your alt tag keyword rich. If your images are not going to be displayed for some reason, the image placeholders will show the alt text in place of the images. This will make your pages still complete without the images and at the same time, it will be used by the search engines to gather more information about the images that are being used in your website. Choose search engine friendly formats for your image such as JPEG or GIF. Added to that make sure that the images are not too heavy for fast loading.

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