Purpose of Optimizing Blog Images for Search Engines

By seeing an image on a blog post, search engines does not understand what our blog is all about.  We need to make it more clear in a descriptive manner to allow search engine spiders to crawl our blog. 

Optimizing blog images helps to get targeted traffic through Image Search Engines like Google image search, Bing images and Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa that are popular photo sharing sites on the web.

It is only recently that bloggers have started giving importance in optimizing their blog images.  This is such a cool method in getting targeted traffic without much effort.

Blog Image Optimization

You might as well may want to check out the 5 guidelines for better blog image optimization:

1.   Alt text

This is an 'alternative text' (alt text) for blog images.  It is a text that help search engines to have a better understanding about the image.

The syntax is also useful where viewers would like to browse the blog by turning off the graphics.  Here the visitor would only see the alternative text instead of the image.

Once you add an image on your blog, go to the Html view and you will see a code as shown below.

Change the code to

In the code only just change the "Alternative Text for Image" to a text relevant to your blog post and image.

For Example:
If your blog is about SEO Techniques, you can use an alternative text for image with a keyword relevant to the blog post.



2.   File Name

The file name of your blog should be keyword oriented and this too help visitors on the web to quickly find your blog image.


For Example:  When you use Google images or any other search engines to find an image for seo tips, you would notice that most images display the file name.

Google Image Search for Seo Tips

When you hover on any of those pictures on Google image search, you would see the image file name as shown in the below image.

Image Search for SEO Techniques

Note that you need to save the image file name with hyphen after each word.  Most Search Engines treat the hyphen as spaces.  Eg. seo-tips-and-tricks.jpg

3.   Image Captions

They may not seem important, but it is a good practice to always write a caption. Visitors do find the captions of an image catchy, when they visit a website.  Captions decorated with keywords is another method to drive traffic to your blog.

4.   Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Too much of makeup doesn't make a woman look very beautiful.  The same applies with blog images.  Search Engines would find it disgusting on crawling an image stuffed with keywords and would assume it is spammy.

5.   Monetize Blog Images

Just as you can monetize blogs, there are many sites that help you to monetize your blog images with adsense and CPM advertising.  Find the one that adapts perfectly with your blog and get you more image traffic as well.

It doesn't take much of your time to optimize your blog images, as mentioned in these detailed guidelines provided.  Once done the traffic through images keep flowing and that is until you decide to delete your blog.

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