SEO through images - A complete guide.

Images play a significant role in boosting your SEO practices. They can be a real game-changer and can increase the organic traffic of your website manifold. Want to know how? Let me start with the basics. My guide will be useful to the advanced SEO practitioners and the beginners as well.

For the beginners, they first need to know about two significant updates Google has introduced till date for the image search feature it provides.

1)   Reverse Image Search -

This feature was added in 2011. Till 2011 you could only search for images using texts. Suppose you wanted an image of plants, so you used to type plants and get the relevant images.

But now what you can do is directly insert an image or URL of an image and get similar images. Interesting enough? To do so, follow the steps below.

1.    Go to images.Google.com,

2.    Click the camera icon

3.    Now select an image from your computer or paste the URL or the image related to your search.

This feature can help you a lot with your SEO strategy, which I will discuss, later in this article.

2) Removal of "View Image" button -

In 2018 Google introduced another update. It removed the "View Image" button from the image option and instead introduced a "Visit Website" button there.

This feature has a lot to offer from an SEO point of view. I have elaborated on this in the latter part.

Why do SEO through images?

Image SEO strategy is much simpler, and everyone can do it! Perhaps, because of this only people don't pay enough attention to it. According to stats, 10.1% of Google's traffic is for image.Google.com. That's huge! And you target this audience it will be easier to drive more traffic to your website because-

1)   No one targets them

2)   They are a good number to target.

Also, Google ranks images just as it ranks websites. So an optimized image would rank higher and could bring people to your website.

I think this was luring enough to tell you why to pay attention to SEO through images.

Now, before jumping to SEO through images let us discuss-

How can you optimize your image to rank it higher?

There are specific techniques to do this. Keep them in mind, and your image will rank higher in Google's image search result.

1)   Give your images relevant file names!

The file names should reflect the content of your image. Google crawls your image file name. So a keyword-rich and a relevant file name would get higher rankings for your image.

2)   Your images should be of the proper size and quality rich!

If your image is larger than it will take more time to load, and if your image's quality is low than it will not be user friendly. Both the situations will send low signals to Google from SEO point of view. So an image of good quality and small size will help the image to gain higher rankings. Choose the proper file type for your image.

Use of srcset HTML code -This code tells the browser of the user to load different dimensions of the image according to the screen resolution of the user's screen. 

You can use tools like Compressor.io or Optimizilla.com to optimize your image.

 3)   Do not forget to give proper alt texts to your images!

Let me first define what ALT texts are. Google cannot read images. So ALT texts are bits of metadata that tell Google what your image is. So a keyword-rich ALT text will give a boost to your SERPs rankings.

You would think what the benefit of the images on your site rank higher in Google's image search is? Well here comes in picture the update by Google! The "Visit Site" button will help to direct the traffic to your site if the image ranks higher because the user will know where can he or she find more such similar images or content related to that image.

So, got your image higher rankings to drive more traffic? Well, this isn't enough! There are more hurdles in the scenario.

Even if the images of your site rank higher, it is possible that traffic is not directed to your site. To make sure this does not happen, keep the following points in mind.

Techniques to drive traffic through Images.

1)   Create your images.

Creating your own images has many benefits. Let us say if you use stock images then even if you make efforts to get higher rankings, the image will direct traffic to the website from where you got the image in the first place. Also, stock images can never fully justify the intent of your content.

For example-

This image is on rank 1 for coffee mugs but would you go and visit the site? If this site had created a good image on its own, instead of using any readily available image, it could have driven a good amount of traffic on their website.

2)   Try to use image keywords relevant to your content.

Your image should only rank for the keyword, which is relevant to your content. If it does not than optimizing it would waste of time and efforts.

See this - 

Here the user intended to find sketches of school. Now this image ranks high for this keyword. The image directs us to an app for different drawing tools. Well, that would be pretty irrelevant!

And now see this-

It does not even rank for drawing tool apps for which it actually should!

3)   Use relevant images.

You should use images that are relevant to your content. Suppose you write blogs on parenting. Now you depict Kareena Kapoor as a perfect mother and make your image rank on the keyword "Kareena Kapoor". Understand that people searching for Kareena Kapoor won't be interested in this. They would probably be searching for it to know the latest news about her or her film career or whatever.

So if your article ranks there, the user will immediately bounce back, and your efforts would be a total waste. If you want to use images and make sure it is relevant to your website, you can create infographics.

4)   Watermark your images.

Using watermark lets people know the original source of the image. You can mention your brand name, URL, Social Media links and whatnot, as a watermark to promote yourself! This way, people will know that they can find more such images and relevant content on this website.

These were some tips and tricks to drive traffic to your website through images directly. Well, images can also help you get backlinks. Let us see how!

Methods to create backlinks through images.

 There are two methods to do so-

1)   Reverse search Image-

So this feature by Google can help you to find unclaimed backlinks.

See this-

Here when I uploaded an image of tea which was originally mine I could find out which other sites have used the image. This way, I can ask them to give me a backlink.

Well, but then keep in mind that you do not need to go and ask everyone out there who has used your image to give you a backlink. Just ask the sites that could help you gain higher SERPs rankings to provide you with a backlink. Also, you can find sites that have given you a backlink and are giving out poor signals to Google from SEO point of view.

You can use a tool called Screaming Frog SEO Spider to get the URLs of all the images on your website, and then you can run it through image search.

2)   Integrate Social Media-

In this era of social media, everyone's attention crazy and like to share innovative things through their social media accounts. So what you can do is add buttons below your images through which people can share your images on social media, and you can get a backlink. You can create Open Graph and Twitter cards to let people share your images on Facebook and Twitter, respectively.

 Also, there is another tool called Image Sharer by SumoMe, which lets you share images on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

So now you know how to make your image rank higher, get traffic through image search and creating backlinks.

Well to improve overall SEO of your webpage you should take care of some things. Images may create problems when it comes to On-Page SEO. So, there are some practices you should follow to improve your On-Page SEO through images.

ON-PAGE SEO through Images.

1)   Content Delivery Networks (CDN) -

Content delivery Networks are very much trending nowadays. It hosts your images for you so that the page load speeds and the bandwidth issue get resolved. A faster page load speed is considered a plus point from an SEO point of view. But there are drawbacks too.

We know that backlinks are the currency of SEO, and when you use CDN then, if someone gives a backlink to your image they are linking to the CDN. So you may lose a good amount of backlinks. Also, it may happen that while someone is visiting your website, your CDN is down and the visitor bounces back because images don't load.

So, as far as possible try hosting your images on your site itself! But then if you are bulky website and you are visited by lacs of people every day using CDN becomes essential, and thus you will have to do the trade-off. Some popular CDNs are CloudFlare and Fastly. 

2)   Leverage browser caching -

Browser Caching helps when one user repeatedly visits your website. Here the server can tell the user's browser to temporarily store the images so that it does not have to reload the images on subsequent visits. This will reduce page load speed and improve your SEO. A plugin to enable this feature on your WordPress website is W3 Total Cache.

3)   Create a sitemap -

The easier you make it for Google to crawl through your website, the better it is from an SEO point of view. Google cannot read images. So a good practice is to create a sitemap for images wherein the URLs of all the images used by your website are stored at one place. By doing this, it will be ensured the Google crawls all your images. To create a sitemap for your WordPress website, you can use the Yoast plugin, and for others, you can use the Sitemap Generator and Screaming Frog.

4)   Lazy Loading -

Lazy Loading helps to loads the images as and when required. The images are loaded when users reach them. As users scroll down, the images start to load. Thus your page load speed will be improved. The WordPress plugin to enable this feature in WP Rocket.

5)   Utilize schema markup

Schema Markup is a code that tells Google what your data about is. A typical example of schema markup is shown below -

The red underlined part here is the schema markup. It is good practice to include schema markup as they make your SERP entry look more user friendly. You should follow the same for images too. Google supports four markups for images, and those are videos, recipes, GIFs and products. It would be best if you used them to enhance your On-Page SEO.

So, until now, you would have understood what prominent role images play in SEO. It can prove to be a significant boost up if used smartly.

Do tell me your views and feel free to give suggestions. Stay tuned and have a nice day!