Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is a pretty important part of the online world nowadays. While their importance has diminished in the past few years because of the rise of the social networks, with Facebook having more daily views than Google in the US already, Search Engines are still the main driving force for new and recurring traffic to almost all the websites on the Web.
Getting a site to rank on the first page for any main keywords is one of the first things you should do, and keeping it there is a daily task, as well. Of course, it was much simpler to do it a decade ago, when there was a lot less competition and the search engine algorithms were much simpler, but even nowadays, it’s not that hard to rank in Google and Bing (the latter powers Bing.com, as well as Yahoo.com, in case you didn’t know) if you know the rules and know what you need to do.
But having your text content ranked is not the only way to get traffic from search engines – you can also have some great success by getting images from your site on the first page, and the SEO for Image Search (which I’m sure you’ve used at least a couple of times) is much simpler – there are fewer rules and if you follow them to the letter, you’ll undoubtedly succeed. Here are the things you need to do in order to get your images to rank high in Google and Bing’s Image Search:
Assign proper names.
Don’t just upload your photos straight from your camera or from Photoshop with the default names like “DSC-00349” or “Untitled-3”. You need to give the photo a name that would contain the keyword you’re trying to get it to rank for. If it’s a picture of the iPhone 4S, for example, name it “Apple-iPhone-4S”. This is the most important point, and it accounts for the majority of points Google will assign to an image when deciding where to rank it.
Use captions and ALT tags.
A caption right beside the image in question that contains the keyword you want to rank for will help a lot, as well. That is because Google cannot see what is on the image, so it has to use surrounding text to gauge its relevance to the search query. A caption is the closest text to the image, and it will play a role in getting that picture to the front page. The same thing goes for the ALT tag, which basically should contain the image name and/or a short description – not only will Google see that, but it will also help people who can’t load the full image for whatever reason (slow Internet connection, saving bandwidth, etc.).
Place the image on a relevant page.
It’s a simple rule, yet a lot of people seem not to care about it. You need to place the image, with the right name, ALT tag and caption, on a page that contains an article, video or audio that is relevant to it. If you just create a post about skin care products and place a random image of a flower (even though it may look nice), that will not help you rank, and if Google somehow finds out that it’s definitely, irrefutably irrelevant, they can slap the whole site with a filter and your pages could disappear from the front page or even the index for months at a time. You definitely do not want that, right?
Having images from your site rank in Image Search can bring quite a lot of traffic – Amazon, for example, thrives on this with their book sales, and there are millions of queries every day on Google alone – guess where the users go when they click the image the second time? That’s right, to your site! The above tips are pretty much the only thing you need to follow, so why not do it yourselves?
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