Why Image Optimization is Important for Blogs
This time, instead of explaining why image optimization is important for blogs I will simply demonstrate it.
One day I checked my search traffic from Google. These were the top 12 search referrers for that month on SEO 2.0:
| Search Term | Source (Google) |
| alone | image search |
| fake | image search |
| fakes | image search |
| best rss reader | search |
| seo blog | search |
| chewbacca | image search |
| seo 2.0 | search |
| silly | image search |
| fun | image search |
| wordpress | image search |
| who to follow on twitter | search |
| fake breasts | image search |
SEO 2.0 had much more direct, social media traffic and other referrers than search traffic so it might be a bad example.
Nonetheless the word “alone” brings 10 times more traffic than the term “SEO blog”.
I was globally in the top 10 on Google.com for [seo blog] (at 7 when writing this viewed with an US proxy).
Do I still need to tell you why image optimization is important for blogs?
- art
- photography
- design
- gadget
- ecommerce
oriented blogs can get big amounts of image search traffic.
Image search as part of Universal Search is a must optimize for in SEO 2.0
Some bizarre aspects of it:
- I was at #1 on Google.com for [wordpress] when using image search.
- I was not even on the first page results at 10 in the US for “alone” on image search so there must be a whole damn lot lonely people out there.
Next time I will explain how to optimize for Google image search.
It’s different than most people tell you. Forget all the alt-attributes etc.
Most visitors who are looking for pictures appear out of the sudden, suck blood, and go. I guess these people don’t know much about blogs, and most of them don’t even get the idea that the Flickr link beneath a pic leads to a site where they can the picture in a higher resolution. At least that’s my experience (with a blog for a German-speaking audience).
I know exactly the feeling, I got hundreds of hits a month last year on a single image in a tutorial. Amazing the things google decides are the important ones!
Exactly guys. So once these people appear, what to do with them? This is a question I want to answer.
my blog’s visits from image search were very little,so very looking forward to seeing your next post.
Actually I was checking the exact thing on my site today. I think is not important only for blogs but actually for every single site on the internet. Great post as usual. What surprised me the most is that you have actual single words keywords coming to your site.
I think further appealing images are something that could well be incorporated into our sites.
Federico: Yeah, images are important everywhere but blogs are in a better position it seems.
mat: I think so too :-)
What do you mean forget about ‘alt’ tags can you please divulge some more information about this?
I mean that alt-attributes for images are like meta keyword-tags. Everybody abused them. Now they get discounted. I never use them, at least not for SEO and rank like hell in image search despite or due to the lack of them.
Is it the image filename then?
Yes. But that’s not the sole factor.
Its amazing how many people come to a site for an image and never stick around, i blame google for making it too easy…
I am super interested in finding out how to rank my images in google images. Since the keyword I am working on always displays an images result on the first page above any other site it will defiantly generate great leads for the business. Please let me know when the next post comes out…. I am dying to know!!!!!
The power of SEO for image search is often underrealized. It can bring in quite a substantial ammount of traffic. Im looking forward to what you have to say on the topic.
Hello ! ;)
My name is Piter Kokoniz. Just want to tell, that I like your blog very much!
And want to ask you: will you continue to post in this blog in future?
Sorry for my bad english:)
Thank you:)
Piter.
Wow, optimizing images… taking blogs to a whole other level!
Great article underlining the importance of optimising images, BUT I’ve found that whilst links from images increase the overall visibility of your site, the sort of traffic they generate is not always useful. I’ve found that surfers searching for a particular image aren’t often buyers.
A significant amount of traffic is generated by images. There importance cannot be overrated.
Tad, this post really made me laugh – how did you get links from someone looking for images of “chewbacca” and “fake breasts”???
BTW, I see the first image you are ranked for is named “white-hat-seo.jpg” – is that intentional, or a mistake?
I know a friend get lots of traffic from image search by “tattoo” related keyword.
@Paul, I would agree that optimising images for blogs are not that important but optimising the image itself is important when it comes to increasing the speed at which your blog loads which I think could potentially rank you higher in search results
For us the alt and file name worked and we can find many images from our site on on google.co.uk by just using Alt and good file name. Make sure that your htaccess file or robots file is not blocking access to images folder.
The power of SEO for image search is underestimated…
great post
i will come back to read some more comments on this subject, i find it very interesting and useful
thanks