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How to use Image based SEO for marketing in 2019?
Table of Contents
While 2018 saw content emerging from the shadow of SEO but 2019 seems to play a more significant role in SEO for Images.
Images can procreate a lot of traffic from image based search engines.
If you want more traffic to your website, you must learn how to optimize respective images to bring traffic.
The usage of images with other media constituents, has always been a way to engross your visitors and seize their attention. Following certain tactics of Image optimization in 2019 like using quality images in your content will give your business the possibility to be more visible on social media, encouraging more involvement of visitors and click through to your website.
Past, Present and Future of Image Optimisation
Peep into the Past
In this fast moving world, the benefit of including images within search results is important than before.In comparison to the content of the website image results are more
- Easily seen,
- Understood
- and Clickable.
The Google President, Eric Schmidt, mentioned that google images search was born because of the craving to see Jennifer Lopez in her outlandish green Versace dress.
Gradually the number of images indexed in google were increased:
- 250 million images were indexed in 2001
- In 2005 the result expanded to 1 billion.
- By 2010, the index enlarged to 10 billion images.
- In July 2010, the image search results were over one billion views a day.
Glance into Present (2019) for Image Optimisation
Factors to keep in mind for 2019:
1. Image Assets
Choose persuasive images to maximize traffic to your website. Visuals are seen 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore to find the accurate image is always crucial. A meaningful image will always be help to give right information and convince your audience.
For Example: If a company wants to advertise multiple sales in one image, he has to be clear, specific and impressive as in above picture.
Basic factors affecting Optimisation of Image Assets
There are two outstanding ways to store and manage your images:
i) One of the reasonable and best option for storing all your digital photos is on photo-centric image hosting websites like flicker.com, imageshack.com, photobucket.com etc.
- Create Account
- Upload images
- Give relevant alt and title tags, loc, description
- Select the creative common license
ii) The second way is to Own the Image Gallery on website
- Create a Gallery Page
- Define Category in H1 Tag
- Define Images in each category with title in h2 tag
- Give relevant description to each image in <p> and alt & title tag.
- Create the creative license code (4.0) and add to each image for copyrights
2. Add and Submit in GWT the image sitemap:
Google crawl those images more efficiently whose sitemap is submitted in Google webmaster tool. Therefore in order to let search know about these images, you must put their location as well as different image assets while creating an image site map.
3. File Names:
It is better to optimise your image file names logically. If you’re naming the image for your iphone 6 plus product page you should not name your image as mgs729942712.jpg. The accurate image file name is iphone-6-plus.jpg. The search engines not only crawl the text on your webpage, but they also look for the keywords within the file names of your images.
4. Alt Text:
The alt attribute gives SEO value to the images in your website. Providing appropriate alt tags to the images can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by giving appropriate and related keywords to the images. The reason behind giving alt attribute is search engines can’t read images. Therefore you need to use alt tags to help describe your image to search engines. So by not including alt attributes for each and every image on your website, you miss a big chance to be visible online.
5. File Size:
For example for the website Amazon.com if their pages slow down even by 1second they will definitely lose $1.6 billion a year . “Page Load Time” is one of the most important factor in determining ranking of respective page. The larger the file size of the images, longer it takes a webpage to load. If images on your website slowly drip down the screen and take over 10 seconds to load, you can bade prospective customer goodbye! It is always better to decrease the size of the image files on your webpage to speed up page load time. Many ecommerce websites may use thumbnails for their websites. Make thumbnail image size as small as possible.
6. Captions:
The caption of the image is the text that is included in the image optimisation. The captions which are under images are read 200% times more than the body text. Therefore if we don’t use them in a proper way, it means you are missing out on an opportunity to engage a large number of crucial readers.
7. How to get Copyright for your Images:
o Register with the Electronic Copyright Office:
ü Complete the application
ü Pay the registration fee
ü Upload or submit the copies of the images being registered
This is the best way of protecting rights for your images which help to protect and prevent other people from copying or using your image without your permission.
8. Image Optimization Tools for Compressing Images:
There are several free online tools available to squeeze and optimize images. Below are several easy and user-friendly tools for making your web images as tiny in file size as possible.
- smush.it! is versatile tool for image optimisation. It is a tool that is available as a Firefox extension or as a simple web-based application (hosted by Yahoo!) etc.
- PNGOUT is a robust image optimization tool which has set of choices so that you can easily optimise files compression to boost traffic via images.
- RIOT has tremendous facilities to gain traffic with images for your website. It supports inputs in JPG, PNG, and GIF files. It has the facility to take out image metadata for reduction of file bloat and it also has some image-editing service such as pan, zoom, and rotate..
- SuperPNG is a free tool for Windows and Mac OS users that optimizes your GIF images.
- Online Image Optimizer is another online tool for compressing your images etc.
9. Image Optimisation in WordPress:
There are many wordpress plugins to optimise your website. But before hoping on plugins it is better to check other factors which are mentioned above to influence seo for image optimisation.
Some of the wordpress plugins for image optimisation are given below:
o EWWW Image Optimizer WordPress Plugin
o WP Smush.it WordPress Plugin
o SEO Friendly Images WordPress Plugin
o PB Responsive Images WordPress Plugin
o Media File Renamer WordPress Plugin
There are many options as far as WordPress image optimization plugins go. Choose one that suits your exact requirement.
10. Reverse Image Search:
It is widely used in 2015 and holds promising future in the image optimisation search technology arena. Reverse image search engine technology takes an image file as input query and returns results related to the image. You can use a picture on your computer or anywhere as your search to find the images which are similar to it around the web. When you are doing a search using an image, at that time any images or URLs that you upload will be stored by Google. Google only uses these images and URLs to enhance your products and services.
Snoop into the Future of Image Optimisation 2019
The below given factors may impact either now or in future:
- EXIF Image Metadata: According to Matts Cutt software engineer at Google said that Google was not yet exactly using image meta data. Exif data could be included into search results in the future. Besides, Cutts recommended “if you’re taking pictures, I would go ahead and embed that sort of information if it’s available within your camera.”
- Page Rank for product image search: In 2008, Google disclosed a paper named “PageRank for Product Image Search” that entrenched a way of computing a new image ranking factor. Precisely this method accumulates the images that are returned for a query and it recognizes the interest points within the images. It uses those interest points to provide resemblance between images and then ranks the image that has the maximum similar points as the highest.
There is no authentication saying this method has been triggered as a ranking factor, but hopefully it will be used in the future.
- ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge:
The ImageNet large-scale visual recognition challenge is the biggest academic challenge in the world of computer. It happens every year to test the in depth understanding of the image, both in the sense of identifying the objects in images and tracing where they are. These technological growth will acknowledge even better understanding of image and the progress will directly affect Google products such as photo search, image search, YouTube and many more.
Google is definitely going to deepen its understanding of image optimisation technique in 2019. Some of the above mentioned factors are going to get more advanced especially reverse image optimisation. We should be prepared for more aggressive competition in image optimisation arena.