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Increase Traffic To Your Website With Images

| 4 minutes to read

How to optimise images on your websiteBy renaming your images to include descriptive filenames, that includes a relevant keyword, writing relevant alt text and making use of image sitemaps, you can increase website traffic with images.

Use Descriptive Filenames

Make sure that you use relevant keywords in your image file name this helps the search engines to understand the content within your image.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce website that sells “red golf hats,” you want to rename your image to include “red-golf-hats” within the image URL.
Potential customers like to see product images before making a purchase.

Renaming images is extremely important when using digital cameras, as many photos are given non-descriptive file names such as ‘DSC0058.jpg’ or picture1.jpg. Optimise the images to be highly relevant to the search engines and your potential customers.

File Name Guidelines:

  • Think of what your customers would type into the search engines.
  • Consider looking at some keyword research. As you may uncover some search terms for your products that have a lot of keyword search volume potential
  • Be descriptive and use plain English
  • Include keyword in your file name but don’t overdo it
  • Use hyphens to split the words; avoid using other separators such as underscores or other signs (e.g. + ; /; etc)
  • Go for a shorter name rather than a longer one (4-5 words at max).

Optimise ALT text on images

ALT text, or alternative text, is a written description of an image to help the search engines to understand that image.

The ALT text is included within a HTML tag known as the “ALT tag”. If this doesn’t convince you enough to create an ALT tag for every image then this might: remember that image descriptions are vital for users too. ALT tags help your visitors understand the content of the image if they can’t view the image.

Here’s an example of a well-optimised Alt tag (taken from Asos):

Example of Alt Tag - Asos Blue Shoes

The ALT Tag for the above image:

Example of Alt tag - alt tag for asos blue shoes

Make sure that every image on your website has a unique ALT tag that contains the target keyword and a brief description of the image.

Here is how your full image source code should look like:

<img src=”where your image is saved” alt=”Target keyword (product name) and a short description”/>

Alt Tag Guidelines

  • Be descriptive and use plain English
  • Include your key term but avoid keyword stuffing (e.g. “Buy blue shoes now cheap best price on sale”)
  • If your products have serial/model numbers do use them.

Optimise Your Image Size

Page load time is an important ranking factor and Google is very keen on ensuring that the user experience is not affected by a slow loading website.

Equally, a slow page load can cost you time, money and loss of leads.

For example, Amazon reported that if their page loaded just one second slower they could easily lose $1.6 billion in sales every year.

In this case, size really does matter when it comes to images and optimising the size of your images can have a positive impact on site speed.

Image Size Best Practices

  • The suggested file sizes can vary. It’s best to aim for 100Kb, for small images, where possible without jeopardising image quality.
  • Crop and scale down your images with photo editing software before uploading them to your website.
  • Use the following supported image file formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG, and AVIF.
  • Use the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) file format for icons and your website. This will allow your logos and icons to scale without any lose of quality. Equally, these are smaller file size compared to transparent PNGs, resulting in faster page loading speed time.
  • Use an image compression plugin for website or an image CDN (content delivery network), as this can help to reduce the file size of your image without reducing the image quality.

To check whether the images make your website slower; you can use free tools such as Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insight. If you see any images over 100Kb have a look and see if you can decrease the file size without sacrificing the image quality.

You can use several tools including Photoshop or the free tools Gimp and Tinypng to decrease the size while having a good quality of the image.

XML Sitemaps

To make your images appear in Google Image Search they need to be indexed. You can easily find out whether your images have been indexed by doing a site search for your domain name (site: yourdomain) in www.images.google.com

If you can’t see your key product images you should perform the following checks:

  • Check every image has its size dimension (width and height) defined in the HTML
  • Do the same for the ‘Alt tag’
  • Check your robots.txt file to see if the image sub directory as well as the relevant page isn’t blocked from crawling

Having an XML Sitemap helps to improve the efficiency of the web site crawling process and ensures that important pages can be indexed.

To make sure that your images show up in Google Image Search you can add the image information within a Sitemap, which can improve your traffic volumes.

Add images to Current XML Sitemap

You can provide image information to Google in your existing XML sitemap where you can include up to 1,000 images for each page.

The tag that tells Google everything about your image <image:image> as well as the  image ULR tag <image:loc> are both required.

Responses

  1. Images drive traffic to your blog

    […] the size you want and download it.   Pay attention to the size you ‘re going to choose.Learn why ”size really does matter when it comes to images and optimising the size of your images can […]

  2. […] Make Use of Images. This helps because it’ll allow you to gain traffic via Google’s Image Search as well as helping to improve engagement of your visitors. For a comprehensive list of things you can do with images that you post on your blog to increase traffic, check out this great resource. […]

  3. Barney avatar

    I designed some pictures to share and was searching for way for optimising them and I came across your this very useful article. Now starting to work according to your advice. Thanks a lot and good luck.

  4. Dan Hodgins avatar

    Images properly optimized for search with keyword file names, titles and alt tags have performed well for me for increasing organic website traffic Lenka.

    I continue to include visuals such as: graphics, diagrams and photos in my posts whenever possible to communicate in different modalities.

    If you provide people with photos + diagrams/illustrations + text + audio or video you’ll communicate with them in multiple ways while catering to different learning styles.

    Here are more ideas for increasing organic website traffic:

    https://www.danhodgins.com/super-specific-tactics-for-increasing-organic-traffic-80-20

  5. Niklas avatar
    Niklas

    Good post Lenka, have to try your tips!

  6. Karan avatar

    Hey Lenka,

    Can you tell me more tips and tricks to incresae traffic from images…???

    I Vill be very grateful to you…..

  7. Richard Yeo avatar

    Hi Lenka
    A good post. I recently posted an article on Econsultancy which covers a few other areas that yours doesn’t (and yours covers a few areas that mine doesn’t)
    https://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/63443-how-to-optimise-your-images-for-seo
    Hopefully both articles are of use to people.
    Richard

  8. Entreb avatar
    Entreb

    Hi Lenka. This article provides a lot of great information, especially the technical stuff in image marketing. Image is very important in display marketing. Images are now very important as evidence by the popularity of image social media like Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook.

  9. Tony Dimmock avatar

    Image optimisation is a key element of on-page (and off-page!) SEO and is too often seen as an after-thought by many online marketers.

    Every opportunity should be made to enhance a users website experience, especially for visitors who may be visually impaired – hence why using descriptive alt-text is important.

    Your excellent guide provides actionable tips for webmasters and social sharing alike. Can I suggest including a few more ideas ?

    1) Topical imagery – think seasonal, events, brand promotions and current affairs

    2) Relationships between colours & emotions – think overall website theme, aesthetics & sentiment. Users often decide within seconds whether the website they’ve visited ‘gets it’. When using colours, it’s vital to provide imagery that fits a website’s ideal target persona (or personas)

    3) Google Shopping images – for eCommerce sites, optimising images (and titles / descriptions) can help products become visible (although the section on XML & Image Sitemaps touches on this).

    Thanks for sharing such great tips & advice :)

    Tony

  10. Carolina avatar
    Carolina

    Great article! thanks :)

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Thank you, Carolina. Glad you liked it.
      What are your thoughts, would you add anything else to my list of things for better image optimisation?

      1. Carolina avatar
        Carolina

        Hi Lenka, thanks for replying. I can’t help much since I’m pretty new to this subjects, but thanks again for your article, very interesting and well explained. :)

  11. Jemma Taylor avatar

    After starting optimizing my images i noticed a small increase of traffic that came directly from Google images…so well worth doing it!!

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      That’s great, Jemma! Is there anything you have done to optimise your images which I forgot to mention in my article? Thank you.

  12. Faizan Khamisani avatar
    Faizan Khamisani

    Lenka,

    Thanks for asking, I have two things to share.

    1. Image Captions:

    Currently, there is no connection between Google rankings and image caption (As I know), but maybe in future. However, this is important, because image captions are most well-read text of an entire website by user, and it can help you to lower your bounce rate as well.

    2. Tag Images with Schema.org:

    Schema jointly launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By using schema for images will help search engines to understand the website images easily. After adding schema tags anyone can test that page via Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

    I hope this will help people to maximize the potential of the images.

    Faizan Khamisani

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Thanks for your comments and ideas Faizan. I agree with you image captions are great and definitely useful. The same With schema; I always start with tagging the logo first.

  13. Andrew Aidan avatar
    Andrew Aidan

    Dear Lenka,

    I like this article, very informative & helpful for my web

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Thank you, Andrew. Is there anything else you would add to the list to better otpimise images for more traffic?

  14. Faizan Khamisani avatar
    Faizan Khamisani

    Lenka,

    The article is really informative and there are few things new to me. Thanks for the great share :)

    Thanks

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Thank you, Faizan. Glad you found it useful. Would you add anything else to the list that may help to maximise the potential of the images?

  15. Andy Birkitt avatar
    Andy Birkitt

    This is a great post and it covers an issue that is all to often overlooked and it shouldn’t be anymore, more importantly if you read and take note there is plenty of advice here to help.

  16. Christopher Skyi avatar
    Christopher Skyi

    Getting an error when I click on “Image Search Traffic Advanced Segment:”

    Security problem. Please try reloading the page.

    We cannot verify your account credentials. Please verify your account information, then sign in again

    I am signed into my GA account

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Hi Christopher, I’ve tried it too and it all worked fine. Maybe stupid question but have you tried it in different browsers or clear your cache? Hope that helps.

  17. Ty Whalin avatar

    Good post. Although as a seasoned SEO professional, it is nice to review from time to time on the thing’s any good SEO professional should be doing anyway. I thought the ideal of Flickr common rights was a good thought. Did not think of that one. Thank you.

    1. Lenka Istvanova avatar

      Thanks, Ty. I agree, every good SEO-er should do it. Although you can see that even big websites (big companies) don’t utilise it and leave their images without name and description. Well, loss for them.
      Would you add anything else to the list then?

      Thanks again, glad you found it useful.

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