Using Google Image Optimization to Generate Website Traffic

Quality content used to be the major form of improving search engine rankings for a website.  In recent times, though, that has moved on to include images as well.  The concept is called On-page Optimization.  This can be enhanced by creating an exclusive image and taking screen shots of it.

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, may be the actual motive behind this concept of using images for Search Engine Optimization.  Properly used images will appear on Image Searches through search engines.

There are a few things to take into consideration if working towards On-page Optimization; the title tag, the name of the image, the size of the image and of courses the linking of the image as well as alt tag.  Relevancy is very important when using an image for a website, just as back links relevance are important for content that contains text only.  The image has to reflect what a website is actually offering.

Alt tag is important for optimizing an image.  Alt means Alternate.  An alternative to the desired image will come up with a text message in case the image is having trouble loading.  This text is the alt tag.  The alt tag can be a title of the image, or a brief description.  For the search engines that do not have the ability to read images or videos, instead of a blank space coming up when the image is requested, the alt tag will be displayed.  This actually helps to keep a good search engine rank, whereas a blank space would hinder a good rank.

The use of an alt tag is to give a search engine an indication of where the image is located and will also give a little description of the image.  Relevancy is crucial, so the alt tag has to contain information that is relevant to the image.

The image must have a reliable file name; default names such as the letters and numbers that may appear as DC1129.jpg must be avoided completely.  Using the default file name does not give any information about the image.  If the file is titled Optimization Image, for example, keeping in mind that the file name should be separated by a hyphen, it becomes very handy if the image plugin is used for WordPress.  The image file name is thus changed to alt tag.

The size of the image also plays a very important role in helping browsers to actually see the image.  A heavy page will not be able to load quickly, longer than five to ten seconds will most likely cause a surfer to leave the page.

Images should be easy-loading, if a viewer leaves the page quickly, it may affect the standings in a search engine.  Image hosting is also quite significant; Google gives preference to images that have been hosted on a single domain in text form, rather than to those that are hosted on multiple domains.  Attention should be paid to the combination of image and text on the page.