How to Optimize Your Blog Images For the Web

Did you know that blog images can help improve your site’s bounce rate? And that they can also help increase your site’s traffic? That is, optimized images can.

I bet you've already SEO-d your website pages and blog posts. But did you optimize your image as well?

When you optimize your website, you are basically helping search engines like Google and Yahoo to index all your contents correctly. Search engines can’t really read images so you need to help them understand what the picture is all about. And here are ways on how you can do that:

1.       Be descriptive with your image Title. An image can have a ‘title’. Search engines don’t really care about the title, but your visitors will see this if they hover the mouse over the image.  So your title should be descritptive.

If you can, try to insert your keyword in your title. Just because search engines don’t factor in the title doesn’t mean they won’t in the future.

2.       Give your image an optimized and descriptive Alt Tag. Alt tags will help tell search engines what your image is all about. Say, if you have an image of a businesswoman on a desk with a lot of papers, your alt tag should be something like:

 Alt =”New York businesswoman working on desk”

 There are three points you need to consider when making an alt tag for an image:

• Your alt tag should describe the image
• It should be keyword rich (in this example the keyword is ‘New York businesswoman’)
•  It should be short

Your image code now should be look something like this:

<img src=http://www.macswomen.com/nybusinesswomanworking.jpg alt=”New York businesswoman working on desk” />

3.       Name your image appropriately. Because there are a lot of images on the web, avoid giving your blog image a generic file name such as ‘businesswoman.jpg”.

Instead, use a name that’s more descriptive – insert your keyword variations if possible – like “nybusinesswomanworking.jpg”. Here the ‘ny businesswoman’ is a variation of the main keyword ‘New York businesswoman’.

4.       Make sure your images are optimized! If you’re images are too big and are not optimized, it’ll make your site load slowly. This may cause visitors to leave your site and go elsewhere. 

You want to make your image as big as possible without eating too much storage resources. Programs like Skitch can help you achieve that. Through compression techniques, Skitch will allow you to have a big image with a small storage size and without losing quality, too.

You can also optimize your image using Photoshop by using the “Save for Web” option when saving your file.

Other photo editing software alternatives include:

• PicMonkey
• PIxlr
• FotoFlexer

5.       Have an image strategy in place. If you want to post an image of your product, you want to have more than one angle of that product, which means you need to upload multiple pictures. You can also create a collage from those pictures so you only have one image to upload. 

Over  to you..
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