Image Optimization Continues to Draw Traffic

Optimizing photos for search engines is a small and easy but often overlooked task by website designers and web owners. Simply giving the images you use the correct descriptions and optimizing tags and Meta data intelligently can help direct more traffic to your website via the images. 

One Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Many people don't realize that images actually have the potential to draw plenty of traffic, especially from image-based search engines like Google Images. We stand by this view despite the recent update in the Google Images UI, which now lets visitors see a high-res version of the image on the search page so that many visitors don't click through to the host website. While traffic to websites' hosting images from Google Images may have fallen since the new update, visual media continues to be important, and pictures continue to express more than text to visitors and potential customers. 

While we may all be using images on our websites, what's important is optimizing these images for search engines as well as visitors. What does this mean? For one, following the best practices when labeling and describing images so that search engines find you easily and put you near the top of their search result pages. Website optimization for images that are relevant to the content will also keep more people interested and on the page. 

Why Images? 

Images are more than simply decorative elements on a web page, and there are plenty of statistics to suggest it can impact the traffic and therefore conversion rates of ecommerce sites and other websites. Back in 2012, an infographic released by MDG Advertising threw up some fascinating statistics about images: 

• ·          Articles with relevant images receive 94 percent more views than those without images. 
• ·          Text plus images lead to a 14 percent increase in average online views of press releases. 
• ·          37 percent of the response to local search results is influenced by images. 
• ·          When shopping online, a whopping 63 percent of customers value product image quality over product-specific information, 54 percent prefer give images more weight than long descriptions, and 53 percent give it more weight than ratings and reviews. 

According to the infographic, image-based social network Pinterest had just caught on and was at number three among top social media platforms, with page views up by 210 percent in three months. Two years later in mid-2014, Pinterest had become the most-loved, and Facebook the most-hated, of all social media. Twitter and LinkedIn are not as popular as they used to be either, which clearly demonstrates the power of images. 

Best Practices of Image Optimization

There are a few areas of image optimization that most website designers and owners should focus on:

• ·          Describing images with accurate 'image-alt-text' to help search engine spiders identify images. Adding an alt = “image name” to your image tag in the code will do this for you. 
• ·          When carrying out website speed optimization, you need to make sure image loading times are practical and convenient for visitors. To do this, you need to make sure that image file sizes are small enough without sacrificing quality. 
• ·          File naming is also important, especially a file name that you want the image to rank for. This will help with search engine rankings. 
• ·          Captions are some of the most-read areas of your page, so be sure to use relevant captions that don't raise the bounce rate. Image captions are second in importance to your article headline. 

These tips should always be kept in mind when optimizing your website. It doesn't take long to optimize your images and it adds to visitor satisfaction and your search engine visibility, which is exactly what you want isn't it? 

To optimize the traffic your photos bring in, contact Website Optimization.

Website Optimization
3134 SUNNYWOOD DR
ANN ARBOR, MI 48103
Phone: (877) 748-3678
Fax: (734) 661-1331
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/
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