Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional

June 3, 2008

I have decided to switch to revolution theme and will do that next week because this week I will have limited access to the internet. And this excellent WordPress theme is nice intro for my post, because its area is much smaller than xmark theme which I am using in this moment. So, my large images do not fit in the new weblog theme, and I will need to adjust them. I’ve already done that with few of them and will continue with the rest.

The point is that I need to reformat my blog images. And I want them to fit in nice, and I found that general rules (which will not cause problems in any theme) are:

For images, only use .jpg or .gif file formats;

Images on the site should be no larger than 400 x 400 pixels at the most. Even better size would be 200 x 200.

Fortunately there are web 2.0 tools making online living easier. Here I’ve described the real kicker, a good free image resize and editing tool: Image and Photo Edit in Easy Way.

Can images bring me free search engine traffic?

Google spiders will not crawl image, Google will crawl text behind the image.

To get search engine traffic images need alternative, or ALT, text assigned to them (implementing keywords there, but do not use too many to be considered as spam). This is because spiders can’t register images, but rather read the alternative text set to them.

Google webmaster tool is explaining how properly to set your titles and images alt text.

It is important to understand that, go to that link and read short explanation. Additional info here.

Where can I get free images for my blog posts?

Its easy. You can use photo sharing sites like flickr or photobucket, or like I explained at the post Trackback Now, or You’ll Hate Yourself Later you can use Zemanta tool, which suggest images for you, while you are typing in the WordPress editor.

Why I need images in my blog posts?

If above is not enough here are 5 reasons you should definitely consider adding images to your blog posts or pages:

Images append impact to the content on your site, making your pages visually appealing. They create an impression more quickly than a text.

Images make a positive impression, illustrating a point, so visitant is more expected to stay on the site.

”one image speaks thousand words” and evoke a chain of emotions. Those way visitors will stay longer on the site.

Images break up your text on the page and get in easier to read

Images can be tagged with your important keyword bringing supplemental traffic to your site or blog. And this traffic is totally isolated from your text content.

And additionally to everything above, and some kind of encouragement to new bloggers, WordPress makes adding images very easy. If you didn’t used images or just rarely do that, I think this article will persuade you in opposite.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging

Comments

One Response to “Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional”

Noah on August 19th, 2009 8:26 pm

Well written! I totally agree, optimizing images can be a great addition to normal SEO practices. I’ve seen some nice traffic come into sites before based solely on adding some nice, descriptive alt tags to images.
Noah´s last blog ..The Power of Leveraging a System for CRM