Importance of Image SEO For Bloggers

Image SEO is one of the most important key factor which has to be given priority during SEO. Most of us are unaware of this important factor and ignore it when we start blogging and leave our blog images as it is, without an ALT and TITLE tag which is not a good practice in the eyes of SEO. Here at Bloglution, I always tried to make my readers understand any topic in the easiest manner possible. Today’s article talks on the importance of Image SEO and How to optimize them by adding ALT and Title Tag?

Why Image SEO is important?

Not just one, there are many factors which makes image SEO important. One of the most important of them is Search Engines as Search Engines can locate your blog images but are not able to categories them just because of a missing ALT Tag. These ALT Tags informs search engines that images are of which categories. Search Engines try to incorporate more images in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) based on the user query. Your images would never appear in their results if you ignore adding an ALT Tag which can lead you to lose your organic traffic. Not clear yet, let’s take an example, and suppose there are two images in my blog named as A & B. I leave A as it is and optimized B by adding ALT and Title Tags as “image SEO”, when a user searches images related to image SEO, Image B would appear in their results whereas A doesn’t and if more number of your images appears in SERP, definitely you will be gifted with good amount of organic traffic (traffic via search engines).

Tags used in Image SEO

ALT Tag- The most important Tags used in optimizing images as this is the ALT Tag as this informs the search engine bots about the image. It stands for ‘Alternative Text’. It can be normally seen if an image source doesn’t work. Suppose I tagged an image as “Image Optimization”, now this ALT tag informs search engine bots that this image is about “Image Optimization” which would help them sorting it based on user query.

Title Tag- Title Tag is defined as the text behind an image which is displayed when you take your mouse pointer over it. Actually it relates your images with the post. It should be short and related to your post.

How to optimize your blog images for Image SEO?

Excluding ALT and Title Tag, there is another important thing which has to be considered before uploading images in our post and that is ‘Image Name’. Many of us download images from internet for adding it to our posts and save it as it is. They are named randomly as they are related to some other things, but most of us upload the same images with their default downloaded name which is not a good SEO practice. So, in my opinion changing the image which is related to your post is the first step towards image optimization. For example if I write about adding blockquote in blogger, then I would consider naming my images as “blockquote” so that image would appear in SERP when someone googles blockquote. Image name also has the same importance as other tags.

The second step towards image optimization is the addition of ALT and TITLE Tag. We have seen their importance in the above paragraph. It can be added to your images by many ways, you can directly add it your image SRC in the HTML mode by editing the code. The default structure of the code is given below:

<img src="IMAGE-SOURCE" alt="ALTERNATIVE-TEXT" title="TITLE-TEXT" /> 

Blogger users can add it to their images directly by going to ‘image properties’ from the post editor and can also adopt the above method by switching to HTML view. There are many plugins available for Wordpress users which can do this job easily.

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Article by Sandeep Gupta

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