Thursday, February 17, 2011

Tips to Optimize Images

1. Use a unique, attractive image which can earn natural links from other websites. Just copying an image from another website and optimizing it properly may not help you all that much.
2. Put relevant keywords in the file name of the image.
3. Describe your image via the ALT tag, including relevant keywords. It i best to describe the image with some text around the keyword, to make it look more natural.
4. Create some text surrounding the image which is relevant and contains keywords relevant to the image.
5. Optimize the page containing the image. I f your page is well optimized for the targeted keyword, then your image has a better chance of appearing in the search results. For best results, make sure that the targeted keyword appears in the page title tag.
6. Try to acquire quality links, with correct anchor text, both to the image and to the page itself.
7. Don’t make your image too large or too small
8. Use a PNG, JPEG or GIF format.
9. Make sure that your URL is not in any way suggestive of "adult" themes. E.g. if you want your image to be optimized for Women's Gifts and you have just the keyword women in the URL, this may give Google that the idea that your website is somehow related to porn, which may cause it to be filtered it and from the safe search results. You can read more about this issue here.
10. Create an image sitemap and follow all other guidelines and best practices provided by Google for image optimization. Last but not least, share your image on various social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr, to give them more visibility in Google's eyes.