Image Optimization Benefits and Tips Presented by, B Line Marketing

Why Optimize Your Images? Image optimization provides many benefits including: Free product promotion. Photo sharing and social image sharing sites offer more contextual clues than search engines do fin terms of ranking criteria. Images show up in search results pages including Google, Yahoo, Google image searches, Bing, and more.

Why Optimize Your Images? There is less competition in image searches. People are visually inspired. Having a photo of your product appear in a search results page will have more of an impact that just words. In this example, your eyes immediately go to the colorful picture of the dog book.

Example In this example of a search for “books about dogs,” the viewer’s eyes are drawn first to the picture in the sponsored links. This picture is colorful, and fills the entire image box. The one below, though it is a picture of the product, does not take up the entire image box and is not colorful or eye- catching. The first image will surely garner a much higher click-through-rate than any of the other links.

Images In Search Results When performing an image search for the term “red shoes” the first 2 results that came up were from Flickr You can see that one of the sponsored links is for Zappos, a company that sells shoes. If Zappos created image accounts, like one on Flickr, their potential traffic and conversion rate could definitely increase. Having their image gallery come up in searches in addition to their sponsored links would be much better optimization.

Tips for Optimization Save images as JPGs or GIFs, this provides them with better opportunities to be spidered. Be sure that image names match what is actually in the photo, search engines will read the name of the file and accurate names will increase your spidering. Photo titles and descriptions should include relevant keywords without too much text.

When searching “small space design ideas” this was the first image result, it includes: Descriptive title Text that is not too long & promotes the photographer’s blog Photo is clean and looks professional

A Few More Tips… Have a broad photo subject matter, it expands your audience. Photos don’t need to be strictly retailers reaching out to customers. Optimize the image page, include ALT tags that are keyword rich and that will inform search engines of the photo content. If possible, create an image folder in your site’s hosting environment that is accessible to search engines.

Thank You! Brooke Spilberg Search Marketing Strategist B Line Marketing x12