Many marketers do not give much attention to images. However, images are important aspects of traffic generation.
As you already know, search engine optimization, high-quality content, and keywords can result in more traffic. However, there are many other methods you can use to drive traffic to your website. Why not use all of them?
Google Image Search is one of the tools you can use to drive traffic to your website. Online content is now a balance of images and text.
Although text gets much attention, images are equally important. Well, images are also content. In fact, visual content in that matter.
Google Image Search is a largely untapped source of traffic for your site. These are strategies to help you drive traffic from Google images to your site.
Optimize Your Images
First, you need to learn how to optimize images for Google correctly. If you understand SEO basics, then you have already covered this. The process is similar to optimizing your website pages.
Like the text of your pages, there are strategic places you can place images. In fact, certain positions are said to be better than others.
If you do not optimize your image, it can get lost in search engine result pages (SERPs). Image SEO entails first editing your file names. Although this is minimal SEO, it is often overlooked.
Make sure you rename your image file names to reflect the content. Also, modify the image’s alt tags. These are bits of metadata that help search engines to better understand your images.
Ensure your alt tag description is keyword rich, short, and concise. Remember alt tags were meant to help visually impaired users. Hence, make sure they serve this particular purpose. Avoid keyword stuffing.
Your alt tags should be to the point and straightforward.
Compress Your Images
Large images are great. However, they can take up a lot of storage space. You want to utilize storage space as much as you can. Fortunately, you can achieve this through compression.
There are many free tools to help you compress images whilst retaining image quality.
Create Unique Images
It is time you move away from stock photography. If you keep using it, then it will do your website a disservice. This is because stock images lack the personality aspect. Also, they do not reflect your brand. In any case, they are stock.
You can still take stock images and go the extra mile to personalize them to suit your brand.
You can still use stock images but do so sparingly. The benefit of creating unique images is related to SEO. It is now possible to trace original images to your website.
If someone wants to use your image, you can get a credit. In most cases, the credit comes in form of a backlink.
Thus, you should go the extra mile to create images that are visually appealing, high-quality, and original. When you use custom images, your site will look better than your competitors using stock photography.
Find Image Keywords
There is a need to find image keywords. Like any form of content, images equally have focus keywords. These keywords will be used in the alt tag and file name.
Other than focus keywords, make sure you also use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords. Ideally, these are keywords related to the focus keyword. LSI keywords give you more variety.
Since LSI keywords are more specific, they help target readers discover your content. Even if you have used them in your text content, they can also be used for your images.
When it comes to Google Image Search, LSI keywords can help your reach out to a new audience. Look for queries people are searching for and add them to your image keywords.
Use Only Relevant Images
Although this seems obvious, there is a need to pay attention to it. In this case, you should look for images related to your overall topic.
When you use unrelated images, your visitors will bounce off. You can prevent this by using only images that correlate with your topics.
Some experts recommend using infographics instead. An infographic will enhance your SEO efforts with related images. Moreover, it adds rich details to the content.
Infographics can help drive lots of traffic to your site. Also, they help build your authority over time. However, this does not mean you should create lots of them.
Watermark Images
Watermarking is common among artists and photographers. Unfortunately, many bloggers are not into it.
Watermarking is not only for copyright purposes. Other than ensuring it appears only on your website, it can help you drive even more traffic to your site. Also, watermarks add extra details to the image.
An image is worth a thousand words. It is time you try image SEO.
If you feel you have done everything in SEO, it is time you try image SEO.
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