Image Optimization: How to Rank on Image Search
In present digital marketing era images are worth thousands of words and appropriately optimizing the elements related to it will always have a positive effect on ranking.
Expressive Keywords
Always target keywords that describe as well as identify the images and content accompanied with it. The primary motive of “image ALT tag” is to describe it as if the image doesn’t load. So in simple words, stuffing your website elements with irrelevant keywords may harm its usability factors.
Alt Tag
The ALT tag is considered as a very powerful signal to Google crawler and conveys the message to search engine what the image is actually about so it is the best appropriate place to add target keywords here but still say complete “NO” to keywords stuffing. There are numerous examples in which it is illustrated that how image ALT tag helps in ranking for more information have a glimpse of this article – IMAGE ALT ATTRIBUTE– RELEVANT FOR SEO AND USABILITY?
https://youtu.be/3NbuDpB_BTc
File Name of Image
The file name of the image works as a name of the image so make sure it looks something like this your-target-keyword.jpg before you upload it to the server. Separating your keyword by hyphens makes it friendly in the eyes of search engine.
In some cases content management systems add special characters in the image file name just to make sure the file name does not clash with another file name so it becomes mandatory to check it after uploading process and if you find it rewritten it is worth having a discussion with your developer team.
Anchor Text
While creating inbound links to your image, make sure to utilize highly relevant anchor text that is also an enrich target keyword because anchor text will be associated with the target URL in a web search.
Nearby Text
Very less amount of people are aware of this fact that text content available around the image affects the image ranking elements. Search engines are now way much smarter, according to them relevancy plays a vital role in ranking and that is why content surrounding image must be related to it. So make sure the image you use is highly relevant to the article and it must represent the phrases used in the page apart from that make sure you add keywords in image caption as it is highly associated with the image itself.
File Size and Format
The bigger the size of the image the more load time a website will take. It is advisable to use neither too big nor too small image for a web page there are numerous softwares out there in the market for image optimization these softwares helps the user to achieve desired image size without any compromise in the quality.
Images play a primary role in sustaining a visitor on the page so it is worthwhile to spend some time on the image optimization process as it not only attracts user but search engines as well.