How To Leverage Google Image Search To Pull Massive Traffic

Green toadsAlmost every website on this planet relies heavily on Google search engine for attracting a large chunk of traffic. Generally, webmasters focus on optimizing textual content to pull traffic from keyword searches across the globe. It does form a major part of the overall traffic, but it isn't the complete picture. If leveraged correctly, Google image search can pull a large amount of traffic that may leave you astonished. Milking this awesome organic traffic source is not that difficult. Here's how you can dominate Google image search to attract huge traffic through pictures in your content.

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Optimizing for size - This is very much obvious, but unfortunately, it's often ignored by a large number of webmasters. Every single picture uploaded to your website must be web-optimized to reduce its size. Several loss-less image compression techniques allow you to shrink the size of the image without much noticeable degradation in the quality. Reduction in image files size makes webpage download faster and that's one of the important SEO ranking signals taken into account by Google search algorithm. This ensures that your optimized (for size) images are the preferred choice for image SERPs.

Optimized name - This is a fairly simple yet very delicate technique to optimize images for Google image search. I've often noticed webmaster and bloggers using cryptic file names for image files uploaded on their websites or blogs. This is a big blow to SEO for image search traffic. Giving a meaning name to the image file is a powerful way to let image crawler bots know about the image type or content. This way it can be well indexed without any ambiguity. Make sure each word in the name of the image file is separated by hyphen instead of underscores.

Optimized tags - While using the <img> tag to embed the image, you must specify a meaningful 'alt' attribute to clearly define the image. This can be compared with the description meta tag of a webpage or a blog post. Explaining about the image in the alt attribute ensures that your image is included in the most relevant image search queries that match with your image content. Keep the description short (5 to 8 words) telling the exact content of the image.

Placement considerations - Placement of image within the content also matters that may help it in ranking well in image SERPs. Try to keep it above the fold surrounded by SEO optimized text for maximum advantage. The sooner a visitor is going to find it, the better are the results. Placing it way down the content is a poor tactic for image search optimization. Apart from image-only posts which are devoid of any textual content, you must ensure that at least one keyword rich sentence is near the optimized image.