Most companies these days are concerned with their SEO efforts as they rightly should be. Most SEO marketing efforts tend to hone in on content especially articles and video. One area that can greatly enhance your marketing effort concerns is the images you post. Can you really make your static images work for you? Can they really boost your SEO efforts?
- Images enhancement for SEO is mostly ignored but you can use them to augment your other content efforts. Images tend to be a hindrance when it comes to SEO as the search engine spiders really have to slog through images. Far too many sites today are too graphically heavy up top which creates a roadblock for the spiders to get down into your site to be able to read text which will allow your site to rank higher on a SERP.
- Image file size is the difference maker. If you can use images that are less high in overall resolution, your pages will load faster and the image will be small enough for the spiders to actually see it without getting bogged down in it. Use less resolution and shrink the pixel size to the smallest size possible.
- Image file names and formats can have a huge influence on your images’ ability to work for you with the search engines. Rarely do businesses take the effort of properly naming a particular image. The search engine spiders are, generally, hungry for text and do read the image names. Use your keywords to enhance the name of your image so it will work for you as well as content does.
- Load time is a huge factor in Google’s SEO policies and the smaller images will allow your pages to load faster. Also, when you are uploading images, put them in a PNG or JPEG format. These formats are highly compressed which will allow them to load much faster onto your page.
- Your HTML alt-tags are equally important and crucial to your SEO marketing strategies. Your alt-tags, basically, describe the particular image with text. If your images are not loaded onto a visitor’s page, the text for the image will. A crisp an accurate description laced with your important keywords will only help your SEO efforts as the spiders will be readily able to find them and read them.
-Written by Kevin Sawyer
