Ever used Google images to find content? A picture speaks a thousand words as they say but does that picture drive a 1000 visitors to your site? It can if you Seo your images properly.
Outranking the major brands and big websites who not only have massive amounts of incoming links but also high page rank (PR) and high domain authority is not as hard as some think if you use a list of Seo best practices.
On page Seo factors and keyword positioning will also play an important part when completing image seo as well.
Here’s a few basic Seo tips on how to beat your competition and the big boys using the best method for image SEO.
Here’s an Seo checklist for ten of the most important factors when optimizing your images
- Domain authority
- Page authority
- Anchor text
- Text wrap
- File name
- Alt text
- Description
- Inbound links
- Hosted on root domain
- Outbound links to related content
I’ll use one of the best Seo tools from SEOMoz who are one of the leading internet marketing companies offering seo software for this purpose. If i don’t use this tool then i can’t find out some of these figures and complete the job properly.
Domain Authority predicts how well a domain may rank.
Page Authority predicts how well a single page on a domain can rank.
Anchor Text should include the correct use of relevant keyword in the link.
Text Wrap should relate to the images ALT Text and File name, In other words, the text which the image is wrapped around the image.
File Name of the image should include the correct keywords which describe the image and be different to the ALT Text.
Description of the image should contain the correct long tail keyword phrases.
Inbound Links should contain the correct anchor text and the number of inbound links from different domains with higher Page Rank (PR) counts towards the overall rank
Image Hosted on Root Domain scores a higher rank than images hosted on a free server or another server.
Outbound Links to Related Content should contain highly related content which help the searcher find exactly what they are looking for or complete the picture of understanding of your content. In other words related posts and keywords within the content which contain links to an explanation of keyword terms help rank higher.
Lets take a look at a real example for – How To Cook Scotch Fillet Medium Rare
Google images search comes up with the following results
No.1 Result
Inspection of what the Google images bot will scan for this image.
<a href=”http://www.jordoschopshop.com/beef-olives-1.html” title=”Scotch Fillet Beef Olives“><img src=”http://www.jordoschopshop.com/media/catalog/product/cache/ alt=”Scotch Fillet Beef Olives“></a>
File URL – The No.1 ranked image on Google contains NO descriptive file URL in red: img_0257.jpg
Title is: Scotch Fillet Beef Olives
ALT Text – This image contains Scotch Fillet Beef Olives
SEOMoz data
Domain authority 17
Page authority 15
Links 118
Overall this image produced an excellent result considering the site is new and has a very low D.A and P.A. This proves its not difficult to achieve top results as long as you use the basic optimization technique for images and some link building.
No.2 Result
src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_iXux0O_9IBI/THzqw9BwBnI/AAAAAAAAADw/LLH7jgrgHMc/s400/DSC_0986.JPG” alt=”” id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511538170731169394″ border=”0″>
File URL – No description in the URL
ALT Text – Not Added
Title – Not added
SEOMoz data
Domain authority is 80 which is high as its a Blogspot domain
Page authority is 1
Links 0
Good result considering its a free hosted blog with no links or page authority. Maybe its not possible to add ALT Text, Title and a description to free hosted blogs.
No.3 Result
<img src=”/content/cache/400×225/Recipes/Thumbnails/foodsourcenz_bbq-scotch-fillet.jpg” id=”ctl00_LeftCol_RecipeContent_RecipeImage” itemprop=”image” alt=”BBQ Scotch Fillet With Brussel Sprouts, Smoky Bacon & Anchovy Sauce“>
File URL – foodsourcenz_bbq-scotch-fillet.jpg
Title No title is added
ALT Text is added – BBQ Scotch Fillet With Brussel Sprouts, Smoky Bacon & Anchovy Sauce
SEOMOz data
Domain Authority 58
Page authority 37
Links 13
This result could be improved on by building incoming links to this page as it has the best overall SEO potential.
Conclusion: It seems very clear to me that regardless of your domain and page authority, you still need to build links to your content and use the basic optimization for images: ALT Text & Title
SEOMoz offers a free 30 day trial of their Seo software which enables you to compare your sites Seo to your competitors to see where you can improve your rankings.
Ranking higher by optimizing your images for Google isn’t difficult once you learn which elements of your images need attention.
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