Images aren’t always mentioned as powerful SEO devices, but any true search engine optimization professional will tell you that images are more important than ever today.
If you own a website or create internet content of any kind, you will know and fully understand the importance of images. Images are not just illustrations, they can help you grab the attention of a viewer or user, and they are great devices for building brand awareness and brand loyalty.
But in terms of SEO, images can also be powerful.
Let’s look at the images in more technical detail from the perspective of those little search engine spiders.
To a spider, its images look like a large, empty, uninteresting black hole. That’s all.
Spiders can’t see the artful way you position our products, or the happy, smiling faces of your customers or staff. They can’t see the high quality of the image, and they certainly can’t tell if an image has been well chosen or not.
Spiders can only see your images if you tell them to. And it does this by adding the correct tags, descriptors and tags. As soon as you do this with each image you post, three things happen:
1. Your images become visible to spiders and include them as part of your content.
2. Your images are included in the Google image database, and all of these images are listed with links that go directly to the website they came from – back link heaven!
3. You are adding additional keywords, keyphrases, and your brand name to each page of content without breaking any SEO rules or overloading.
By tagging and labeling each of your images, you are adding the number of keywords, phrases, and backlinks that you add to each website page, social media post, and article or news item.
So, for example, if you are an online retailer and sell 250 different products, you can add important titles, keywords, and phrases 250 times, without any of the search engines getting mad at you. Images automatically become backlinks when they appear in Google image search results because they always lead back to the source, which is your website.
On social media, they are also instantly tagged and identified as yours. If users share your images, they can see that the image was yours. On Pinterest, when you post images, you can also add a link.
And the same is true for video footage. And for the music! Just do some Google searches now for all these different media and you’ll see exactly what to add to yours to make sure they’re listed and searchable. The more times your content is available and searchable on Google, the more likely it is to be found and seen. And all of that creates natural traffic that makes you move up the rankings.
It all sounds so simple, right? It almost seems too good to be true. But it’s true, and it works. Take a look at any website and check their images. Are they all tagged? You will be surprised how many sites there are with images that are not tagged.
Don’t miss out on this free and easy way to increase the level of SEO friendly and highly searchable text on your website and social media pages. Instead, go ahead, use fantastic images, and then make sure users and spiders can find them. It will also drive traffic to your site, especially if the images are for products or services you are selling. Don’t underestimate the power of a photograph: to illustrate your business and improve your ranking.
