How to Optimize Images for Your Blog

Bloggers know how critical it is to use sound SEO practices in order to charm traffic from the big search engines. But did you know that the images you use on your blog can also be a great source of search engine traffic?
Google Images is just one example of an image-based search engine. In fact, Google will happily display a row of image results for the keyword phrase entered – at the top of the first page of the search results.
In order to take advantage of this type of traffic, you will need to know how to properly optimize your images. Once you know this “hidden” secret for boosting SEO, you’ll never view images for your blog the same way again.

Alt Text

Since the search engines can’t actually see your images, it’s up to you to tell them what the photo or graphic in your blog post is. This one tip alone will put your SEO efforts ahead of the majority of bloggers out there who either don’t know, or don’t bother, with this step.
Alt text, short for alternative text, is how you can help the search engine figure out what your image is all about. Before you begin, you will want to have your keywords or keyword phrase handy.
To include alt text with your image, add: alt=”your alt text description”. In html, it will look like the following:
<img src=”shiny-red-wagon.jpg” alt=”Shiny red wagon in the driveway”>
If you are using blogging software like WordPress, adding alternative text is even simpler. When you insert an image into your blog post, click on the image then select Edit.
Under Advanced Options, you can add your alt text on the appropriate line. If you choose, you can also add a caption as well as a title tag for a little extra search engine juice.
Click on Update when you’re finished!
Now, any time someone mouses over your image, the alt text will appear.

File Size

The file sizes of the images you are using can have a massive effect on the load times of your website pages. Search engines will take this into account if your pages load slowly.
In order to maximize the speed at which your pages load, you can adjust the image file size to be as small as you possibly can without sacrificing on quality.
Any number of photo editing software programs can help you with this, including some very good free tools like Pixlr Express and PicMonkey.
If you skip this step and use your browser to resize the larger image to a smaller size, it won’t help. Visitors will still have to download the larger image before it can be resized.

File Name

Another area that is easily forgotten when it comes to image SEO is the file name. You are probably used to seeing the generic file names that your camera automatically assigns your photos and the unintelligible string of letters and numbers that stock photo websites give their images.
Before you upload your image to your blog, rename the file. You can use something descriptive and include keywords, as well.

Captions

Captions themselves will not help or harm your search engine rankings. However, they do tend to be one of the most frequently read sections of your web pages, after the headlines. Well worded captions can help hold your visitors’ interest and reduce your bounce rate.
There’s no need to spend your time perfecting your blog posts only to skip out on the opportunity to maximize your search engine traffic. At most, following these basic steps will cost you just a few minutes, but the rewards will continue long after you hit “publish.”
Zoe Anderson is a marketing assistant at StudySelect. She’s keen on learning about new branding strategies and digital marketing tools.

Feeding Search Engines To Rise in Rankings

Search Engine Optimization or SEO. While many businesses may have an idea of what it is, they may not understand how it works or, at least, how to make the most of it for their business. Every business wants to get to the 'top spot' in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. but to do that you have to first understand how SEO works.

Understanding Search Engines

Understanding how search engines work is critical when trying to improve the search ranking of businesses. Without this understanding it is primarily a guessing game and businesses need their SEO strategy to be based on knowledge, not a guess.
Crawling: To begin the process, search engines do what is referred to as Crawling, which does just what it sounds like - it crawls across all the information on the Internet and locates new or updated sites and information. Using Google as an example, they have an enormous set of computers that handles the search portion of their function which is called the Googlebot. By using those infamous Google algorithms, Googlebot "crawls" through all of the data across all of the Internet looking for sites, data and information that was not there previously.
Indexing: When Googlebot compiles all the new words, sites and information that it found during its "crawl", along with the pages where that information was found, it is called Indexing. It is during indexing that things like title tags are processed and compiled as well.
Serving Results: When someone goes onto Google, or any search engine for that matter, and enters keywords to conduct a search, the search engine will then locate all the pages that have the words that were entered into the search and pull out the pages and/or sites that are the most relevant to those keywords. The more relevant the page content is to the words in the search, the higher up in the results that page will be displayed, otherwise known as page ranking. This function also uses the predetermined algorithms as a part of its final determinations.
Now that you understand a little more about how a search engine crawls a business website, it is time to start working on creating a website that will appeal to the search engines.
When you take into consideration the mass of information that search engines are sifting through across the Internet it should make you realize even more why an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and content strategy are so important.

What To Include In The SEO Strategy

• Keyword Research - using words from the business's niche market as well as for the industry and target audience
• Content that is optimized, client-focused and helpful, not just marketing-based
• Optimized pages and posts

Start With Keyword Research

This is where strategy should begin. Find out what keywords customers and potential customers are going to input when they are looking for a business's product or service. Thankfully there are a number of things that can assist with this.

Online Keyword Research Tools

• SEO Book Keyword Tool
• Keyword Eye
• SEMrush
• Ubersuggest
• Wordtracker

Social Media - see what people are talking about on social media about the business's niche.
The customer service and sales staff - they are on the front lines of any business and have the most direct interaction with customers. They can provide the questions customers are asking or items they are most looking for.
Customers - while the sales and customer service staff interact with customers daily, make a direct connection with them as well to find out their needs or any problems a business's product or service can solve.

Create Content That Readers Can Trust (And Feeds The Search Engines)

People go to businesses they can trust and that can help them. One way to create trust is by becoming a thought leader in the industry through creating content that is relevant to the reader and something they would actually search for on Google (Ex: How to SEO a blog post).

Content Ideas

• Blogging on "how to" topics
• Creating FAQs pages/posts
• Resource pages for specific geographic areas

You'll want to make sure to use keywords within the content which should already be part of a business's local SEO strategy. Be sure to check any old posts on the site and ensure they have been optimized and, if not, change them.
To keep website visitors on the site, each page or post should also include at least one link to another page within your site to keep them moving throughout.
In addition to creating SEO focused content, it is also necessary to optimize title tags, image names and image descriptions. Even though these are not visible to website visitors, this information is important to search engines as the information is indexed as they crawl the site.
I realize that this seems like a lot to do, but remember, the search engines are crawling every piece of information on the Internet and a business needs to be optimized to stay relevant in search results.
The SEO strategies outlined here, when implemented, will increase site optimization, attract more visitors, and keep those visitors on a site longer. All of which is what is needed to move the rankings higher on search results.