How to use images in SEO

It's important to understand that images are a powerful tool to boost your search-engine optimization, or "SEO," strategy in four important ways:

1. People can find your images quickly in a Google image search. In fact, the Search Engine Journal reported that twice as many people scroll down through Google image-search results than a standard search-results page.
2. Your images can appear next to your website listing on a Google search-results page to attract more traffic.
3. People love sharing images on social-media channels.
4. Well-published images on your website can earn you higher rankings in search results.

Every good car dealer knows that car shoppers practically never click on car listings that don't have photos, but the way that you display your images on the website determines how many people can find that image. Here's how to make your images attract more online attention:

Use the right photos.

Attract the right kind of Internet traffic by using photos that express and match your content's message. Then, use only high-quality images to make the right impression. As social-media marketing specialist Mr. Bullas notes, 67 percent of all customers commented that the quality of a product photograph was a key factor for them in choosing which product to buy; plus, his survey showed that clients thought a product's image quality matters more than long descriptions or reviews. When selecting photographs for your website, you need them to load quickly and easily across many different channels. Therefore, adjust them to a size between 320 to 1300 pixels with a common ratio format of anywhere between 4 to 3 and 16 to 10. Feel free to add a watermark or copyright notice to show that you have the original rights to the photo if anyone tries to copy it later. Use an image compression of between 60 to 80 percent of the image's original size, so the total size should remain less than 400 kilobytes -- ideally in a JPEG format.

Follow Google's guidelines to help your website listing appear with an image in the search results.

Google's official image-publishing guidelines recommend that you include highly descriptive text and key words for each picture in the image's "alt" tag and in the image's caption that appears immediately below it. The words you use in these places tells Google what the photograph is about and which searches it relates to.

You can also alert your website developer about using Google image extensions on sitemaps, which are your website's collection of all page listings. These added extensions help search engines like Google locate pictures that they wouldn't normally find. These image extensions give search engines additional information about your pictures and let you select specific images that you'd like for Google to index. Some website developers create a separate sitemap to record all of their images, and others simply integrate more image data into their existing sitemap.

While sometimes you may see others doing this, Google advises not to embed text like your page headings or menu items with important keywords into your images. Keeping your key text content in HTML format makes it more accessible to search engines.

Make sure that your images' file names include some highly specific and detailed information about your pictures and overall website. Google uses image file names to collect information about your website, and if Google Web crawlers can't find enough information on the page where you host your image, then Google will sometimes even display the file name on the search-results page. It's a good idea to keep the file name around six words long. Try to make the file name's text show up as a keyword in your web-page content before and after the picture.

Don't forget to make sure that the anchor text of your links accurately describes the final destination of its link. Furthermore, links to your images should contain lots of helpful information in the anchor text like "post-2000 model Ford Mustang convertibles," for example.

Finally, don't miss these extra SEO fundamentals.

Make sure that your page has quality internal links and external links leading to it that will help Google crawlers find you.

Search Engine Journal also recommends one last trick to make key images highly shareable with social media: Add an image tag in your code. It should resemble this example:

That tag ensures that Facebook, Pinterest and other shares will include your image.

After you've followed all these steps, keep in mind that you'll still need to wait for a while to allow some time for Google to index your website and pick up your new changes. Over time, you'll experience the benefits of image-based SEO for yourself.

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