Images and SEO is een bericht van: Ber|Art Visual Design and WordPress Webhosting

Image search optimization

Image search optimization or image search engine optimization

Image search optimization (or image search engine optimization) is the process of organizing the content of a webpage to increase relevance to a specific keyword on image search engines. Like search engine optimization, the aim is to achieve a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.

Image search optimization techniques can be viewed as a subset of search engine optimization techniques that focuses on gaining high ranks on image search engine results. Unlike normal SEO process, there isn’t much to do for ISO. Making high quality images accessible to search engines and providing some description about images is almost all that can be done for ISO.

Find the right images
Finding the right kind of image is incredibly important. Great images can add another dimension to an article or page that can encourage people to share the page and create some great backlinks. Research shows that while text is still the first thing seen on the page, the image is what sells the page.

You can also use Google Images to find images for your site, as long as you search with the proper licensing. (They allow you to search Creative Commons and other public licenses.) But you have to be very careful when using images, as if you don’t have the permission to reuse it, companies and sites can take legal action against you.

The general rule of thumb is this: if the image isn’t Creative Common licensed or you didn’t buy or create it, don’t post it.

Use the keyword(s) in the file name
Just like keywords in post urls are important for pages, the same is true for images. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy. For example, the image above was originally named “iStock_000004221245XSmall.jpg” which doesn’t add much information about this web page. It has been renamed to “image-optimization.jpg”. Of course, most images that are not simply decorative like the one above are literal and connected to the content of the page such as a photo of a product.  If the above image were used in an article about eye color, then the file name should reflect that.

Google suggests that you should place your images in one folder on your site, mydomain.com/images versus placing them in random folders throughout the site. Another suggestion from Google related to file names or URLs of images is to make sure you use common image filetypes such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, and BMP.

Create descriptive alt text
Alt text or tags are another way that search engines help determine what your image is about. Unlike traditional web content, search engines can’t determine the text content of an image. (Search spiders are pretty smart, but as far as I know they haven’t developed eyes yet.) As a result, search engines need to rely on captions around the image, alt text, file names and other surrounding text. Adding descriptive text in the alt tag helps the search engines determine what the content of the image is.

If an image is used as navigation, ie as a link to another page, be sure to use alt text that is meaningful to the content of the page being linked to.

The right anchor text
Anchor text is another important factor in image SEO. If you decide to link to images with text, your anchor text can play a role in how your image is ranked for keywords. Use descriptive anchor text that describes the image.  For example, linking to an image using a generic term like “image” or “photo” or a file name that doesn’t use keywords doesn’t give search engines much meaningful information on what the image is about. Linking to an image with keywords is helpful to search engines as well as people visiting your site.

Make sure the image matches the content
The content surrounding the image should be related to all of the things that you’ve optimized thus far: anchor tags, image url, alt tags. When these things align, it helps search engines confirm that you’re not spamming and that the image is of higher quality and relevant.

Don’t stuff
This goes for all kinds of SEO, but we’ll say it again just for clarity: don’t keyword stuff when filling out things like image alt text. Your alt text, captions and file names should be short and descriptive, not a long list of keywords. Remember to optimize images for your website visitors. Image SEO is as much about user experience as it is about achieving better search engine rankings.

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Berrie Pelser, Ber|Art Visual Design:
Ber|Art is een zakelijke Internet service provider c.q. webhoster die gespecialiseerd is op het gebied van betrouwbare en veilige kwaliteit hosting, WordPress Hosting en (web) design. De onderneming levert, in nauwe samenwerking met partners, oplossingen aan het MKB op het gebied van SEO, domein, shared, applicatie en e-commerce hosting als mede managed colocated server hosting. Ber|Art WordPress SEO Domein Magento Typo3 Google VPS Cloud Hosting Design at Ber|Art

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