10 Tips for Optimizing Your Images for Search part 1
December 25, 2015
Crafting the right title and description tags
December 30, 2015
In the previous article, I explained 5 tips for Optimizing Your Images for Search. In this article, I am going to explain 5 other tips for optimizing your images.
- Separate your thumbnails from main pictures
Ideally, your thumbnails should be as small as possible to minimize page load time. That means you need to resize them and use the appropriate level of compression. Since they tend to be pretty small anyway, you can sacrifice a little bit of picture quality for increased speed.
To do this, you can use a photo editing powerhouse like Photoshop, or you can use one of many free tools that are available today.
- Create image sitemaps
Google encourages you to use image sitemaps to give their search engine more information about the images available on your website. This allows them to find even those images that are loaded by a JavaScript code, which is often the case with product images and slider galleries.
If you already have a sitemap for your site and you should have, you can add image information to it or create a separate sitemap just for your images.
Creating the sitemap is not too complicated. Basically, for each URL you list in your sitemap, you can add additional information about images on that page.
If you are running a WordPress website, you can also take an advantage of available plugins. For instance, Google XML Sitemap for Images.
- Don’t rely on third-party image hosting
Image hosting services like Imgur and Postimage allow you to upload images onto their servers, which is great for saving some space and lessening the overall bandwidth your site consumes. The major downside is your images may become deleted or blocked when the hosting services are overwhelmed with high amounts of traffic.
This is what you want to avoid.
Because of this, it is always a good idea to use your own servers to host your images. You will definitely see how beneficial it can be in the long run.
- Integrate social media
Social media plays an important role in your overall SEO and customer acquisition strategy. The easiest way to integrate your images into social media platforms is to add social media sharing buttons to your website.
One of the most popular ways to encourage visitors to share your images to Pinterest is to add a simple “Pin It” button to each one.
A great tool to use is Image Sharer by SumoMe. With Image Sharer, you can easily allow visitors to share the images on your site and link back to you. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Yummly. You can customize the way Image Sharer icons appear; and if you buy the Pro version, you also get 24/7 help and the ability the ability to remove Image Sharer branding.
- When in doubt, consult Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Google has prepared a set of image publishing guidelines to help you optimize your site for their search engine and your visitor as part of their Webmaster Guidelines. It includes detailed information on the topics discussed in this article, and much more.
What tactics are you employing to ensure that your images show up in Internet search results?
