Written by Hailun (Marco) Feng

Image search optimization is a smart strategy that search marketers shouldn’t ignore because a significant amount of traffic (20% to 60% of all visits, according to Moz) can come from search. images, and the number of people competing for that traffic. is much lower than general web search. In addition to helping your websites rank well in organic search, image optimization has benefits below that many are unaware of.

1: Subtle reputation management

Providing images of your products, services and facilities helping consumers adds trust and transparency to your business, saying you have nothing to hide from the public, which increases consumer trust and the chance that you are selected to do business with.

2: Shopping via image search result

Consumers are increasingly searching for products through Google Images, allowing them to find what they want without digging deep. Make sure you add descriptive alt tags and captions to product images and that they are crawlable by the Google bot. You’re more likely to be seen if your products feature heavily in image search. It also improves the chances of appearing in the universal search result, allowing you to stand out on search engine results pages (SERPs) with a mini image carousel at the bottom of the organic listing.

3: Allow others to promote your business

If you own the copyright to your images, you can let other people take and reuse your visual assets in exchange for promoting your business. Therefore, be sure to watermark your images and specify how you want others to use them on your terms of service page.

Image optimization tips for organic search

Unlike text web pages, images are more difficult to optimize because they provide few clues to Google. Although techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR) to read text in images or facial recognition software to determine if the image is a face, body or something else are available, they are not reliable. . Therefore, the success of image search depends on using all the signals at your disposal to increase Google’s confidence in the content of an image.

1. Emphasize text that immediately precedes or follows the image. These texts are what users and the search engine primarily associate with the image. Avoid placing images in the banner, footer, or navigation, as Google will ignore them as irrelevant.
2. Make sure that the image filename, caption, and alt tag in the HTML code contain your target keyword or its variations.
3. Avoid query strings such as q=databaseion=all for img src as we do for web page url. Removing excessive settings can reduce the possibility of the Google bot refusing to crawl your images.
4. Use relevant, high-quality images or images with some kind of contrast that are easy on the eyes and more likely to attract clicks.
5. Avoid saving JPEGs with embedded thumbnails, which can significantly increase file size. Instead, disable this feature in your editing software; the search engine can copy your image, reduce it and save it in a compressed format, and provide a thumbnail in the search engine results.
6. Have an appropriate copyright license for images used on your site. If you’re using stock images that are also displayed on other websites, change the file size or image ratio, or add a watermark to tell the search engine that your images are “original”.
7. Finally, make sure your robot.txt files (you can access this file by adding robots.txt to your domain) allow robots to crawl and index your image and display them on the SERPs.

Along with image optimizations, search marketers should know that providing a great user experience, investing in original assets, and building and maintaining brand reputation are still important to your organic performance. Although it sounds like a lot of work, it pays off. And that’s how MarcoFeng.com has become one of the top travel sites, with over 1.5 million readers a year, answering over 60,000 questions about travel, food and crafts.

Hailun (Marco) Feng
https://www.marcofeng.com
[email protected]

COMTEX_410526798/2776/2022-07-19T11:56:45