There is nothing worse than waiting for a page to load. As a user you probably get impatient won’t wait that long…and if it’s your site that is taking so long to download, understand that for every additional second of download time you lose 7% of your conversions!
So naturally you would want to strip out anything from your website that isn’t necessary… such as images, right?
But here’s the issue…images are so much more important these days, especially for blog posts. Images explain complex information, they are easier to consume and they generate more social media shares.
In addition to that, images can drive a lot of traffic to your site from search engines. And, according to this Poynter eyetracking study, when people are at your site they will look at the images before the text.
The question is…are your images optimized for search, speed and social media? In other words, are they helping your site or hurting it?
The following 6 tactics will help you to optimize your images so they can bring you more traffic to your site…and keep that traffic there.
Tactic #1 – Optimize your images for people
First things first…you should always optimize images for people because they are the ones who really matter.
Let’s look at a few rules:
Keep them relevant
The first rule of thumb when it comes to putting images on your site is to keep them relevant. The content of the image should match the content of the article.
Use super-sized images
The bigger the better! Take advantage of the technology in web design and monitors and use big and bold images. Look at how Fast Company uses images in their header (it stretches across the screen):
And then look how The Verge uses them, too:
It’s a really great way to combine lots of text with great images. And this is also one of the reasons that Google updated Google+ to host super-sized photos.
Optimize for the RSS feed
People who use RSS feed readers will be blazing through these to scan all the content you have. Use a relevant, great image to attract their attention and get them to click through to your site!
Use faces
When you use faces that are looking out at the reader…giving the sensation of eye contact…you will get more views.
Let’s now get a little specific and talk about the difference between how men and women process images…and I’ll even tell you why this is important at the end.
According to a recent eye mapping study, women process images differently than guys do. Here are some of those differences:
- What women focus on depends on their hormone level.
- Women are attracted to images where there is more than one person…in particular a guy and a girl embraces each other.
- Women are also better at responding to emotional images than men are.
- Men will look at faces before a nude body.
Why is this distinction important? Well, it goes back to knowing your audience…and giving them what they want.
Tactic #2 – Optimize your images for search engines
Okay, now that we have our images optimized for people…let’s optimize them for search engines. Follow these rules:
- Compress images – Although you want to use larger images than smaller ones, the file sizes should be as small as possible. Make sure you compress your image file size and if you are unsure on how to do so, don’t worry as I cover that later in the post.
- Limit the number of images per page – You don’t want to clog the page down with unnecessary images…so just select a few very relevant images.
- Use keywords – There are a number of strategic places that you need to use keywords when it comes to images. Use them in the alt text, in the image name, the page title and in the text around the image.
- Long descriptions – One of the most common elements most people miss when using images on their site is long descriptions. Long descriptions are like alt tags, but more detailed. Here is an example of both:
- Alt tag – Black 1998 Honda Civic.
- Long description – Black 1998 2-door Honda Civic speeding through a red light.
Implement these strategies and you will help search engines correctly index your images so that they will be served up for highly-qualified searches.
Tactic #3 – Optimize your images for social media
Photos and images are one of the most shared pieces of content on the social web (with video being in a close second).
But just because you have some images doesn’t mean they will get shared. Here’s how to optimize your images so they spread quickly over the social web and drive a ton of traffic to your site:
- Use gorgeous photos – This probably seems obvious, but what most people don’t understand is what makes something gorgeous and inspiring. Check out the 45 most powerful images from 2011 for some inspiration!
- Use standard image formats – As you can see, there are dozens of ways you can format an image…
But the most common image types you should use are .jpg, .gif and .png. These formats are easy to display on any device…thus lowering the barrier of viewing and sharing. - Publish your photos on social media sharing sites – If you use a really great image in a blog post…go ahead and share that image in Google+ and Facebook. Plus, host the photo on sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Pinterest, Picassa, Instagram and TwitPic. This will make it easy for people to share.
- Optimize for Digg submission – If you use Digg, better use the .jpg format and make sure your image is 160×120 or 160×160 pixels. Otherwise no image will be presented and you will lose clicks.
Tactic #4 – Optimize alt tag and title text of images
While I mentioned above that you need to add keywords to your alt text and image title, I want to go into a little detail right now about the topic and introduce you to a wonderful WordPress plugin.
The plugin is called SEO-Friendly Images and can do a number of very powerful things for you:
- Add alt tag and title texts – You’ll be able to optimize all your images since this plugin automatically adds a title text and alt tag for every image you have.
- Changes title text and alt tag– This plugin will create different title and alt tag by blending these four variables:
- %title – replaces post title
- %name – replaces image file name (without extension)
- %category – replaces post category
- %tags – replaces post tags
By the way, if you are confused about the difference between the alt attribute and the title attribute, here’s a handy little chart to help you out:
Tactic #5 – Optimize image file names
The file name of an image gets weight when it comes to SEO, so it’s essential that you optimize the file name of your images, too.
The tool to help you do this is a plugin called Media File Renamer. It’s pretty straightforward:
Or you can change the image name manually. Either way, keep these elements in mind when naming an image:
- The file name should be short.
- The file name should describe the image by containing keywords.
- Make sure there are no spaces in your image names. And if you want, you can uses dashes, but avoid underscores.
Tactic #6 – Optimize for image load speed
As you probably know by now, page speed is essential for success on Google, so the final lesson that you need to learn is to optimize them for load speed.
It doesn’t help if you start using huge, killer images to get attention…but it takes forever to load! So what should you do?
Smush it!
Well, that’s the name of a WordPress plugin that will do three things for your images:
- Compress the images.
- Strip unnecessary colors from indexed images.
- Converts certain .gifs to PNGs for better performance.
WP Smush.it is really easy to use and will optimize images when you upload them. But you can also optimize all of your old images in the “Media Library”:
Depending on how many images you have and how big they are will determine how long it takes. I ran Smush.it on a new site that had only 43 images in the library and it took less than 30 seconds to run.
Conclusion
With the web becoming faster and the technology to view it getting so much better…images are playing a huge role in getting attention in the search engines and keeping it when people arrive at your site. You have to do everything in your power to keep that edge.
When you invest some time in implementing these tactics to optimize your images you should start to see more traffic to your site… you just have to give a few months for the changes to kick in.
What other techniques do you use to get more traffic out of your images?
This amazing course will teach you, step by step, how to double if not triple your traffic over the next 30 days.
that’s great image guide.. didn’t know that so much can be done with images to increase traffic.
thanks for the tips
Thanks Vijay,
Glad this post could provide new information to you.
Through the years, using images is one of the best way to get viral traffic, especially images that evoke emotional response. And this guide will certainly enhance the landing page from viral traffic.
Yep, you have got it.
Hey Neil…
How timely this is when our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter!
I especially know a captivating picture will either attract me to read more or bail.
Thanks for the tip for the Media Renamer Plugin, that’s going to help a lot.
You rock my friend, thanks for sharing your wisdom, I officially pronounce you a Marketing Maverick!
- Ken
I appreciate the title Ken, let me know how these tips work out for you!
Thanks a bunch for the wonderful tips Neil. I already knew about alt tags, but did not know that long description was essential as well. Thanks again for the descriptive explanation.
No problem, happy that this post has helped you to learn something extra.
Using ALT and TITLE tags for images really helps to get some organic clicks, thanks for other useful tips Neil
Thanks, glad you agree.
I second that Bharat!
Webcredible has a good article on how to write effective alt text for images: http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/image-alt-text.shtml
Awesome, thanks for sharing it with everyone.
Aligning right image is one of the most important aspect of Image Optimization. The major issue is to search and choose best image.
Best way to search image is Google image search. Another important resources from my end might be Tumblr and Pinterest.
Tumblr is great if you source your images, otherwise I find it’s just people stealing and rehashing other people’s content.
Some nice folks will link back to you though
.
Great point, that is how it is a lot of the time.
Definitely, those resources are useful in searching for images.
found the gender based optimization especially interesting. More to do with marketing than optimization though.
Knowing how to market will help you optimize better.
Man you really look at those atomic elements so well. And great that you noticed “The Verge”, its staff did some good research .
And Neil, one short thing, don’t ever stop posting on this blog, or we might end up on IM s**t.
-Bobby
Thanks Bobby,
Don’t worry I don’t plan on stopping.
Good tips Neil. Haven’t come across a post about image optimisation before.
Thank you Aliosha,
Hope these tips have helped.
Nice article. From experience, I noticed adding just a few images makes a site look 100x more professional.
Amir
Yep, adding images can be a great asset to ones site.
Great tips, Neil. It’s amazing how much traffic can be referred by GIS – and now that Pinterest is blowing up images are more important than ever.
Exactly, images are becoming increasingly more valuable and should be embraced and utilized.
Hi Neil
I don’t know how you do it, but your posts are one of the rare ones I actually read every single word in. Never stopped to think about how much is there to be done about images. Very valuable post.
I like how you have substantiated your claim with faces, and made a light joke about men. I still did not really get the point about segmentation. Do you simply mean if for our product men or women are more represented amongst the customer base that we should take that into account when choosing images?
Thanks for taking the time to share!
Vlad
Yes, that is what I meant.
Very useful tips, Neil!
Do you know if any SE also looks at the Meta-data in an image?
And, in that case, how important they are?
Will, for example, an URL in the IPTC, be counted as a link?
Goran
They do look at meta data in an image. They are quite important, so its best to have them optimized.
now a days Niel don’t pay attention to comments to the readers like me.
It was a great post regarding image optimization. I will keep it as reference.
You didn’t right till today about the “Over Optimization”. I personally request you to please write on it.
Sorry you feel that way Shahzad,
I have a ton of request from my readers on what to write about and try and get through all those request as soon as I can.
Good Luck to you
Thank you, and the same to you.
this is an eye opener. thanks neil. i will be honoured if you check my blog.
Thank you Hansel,
I wish I could check out your site, but due to the amount of request I get I do not have the time to do so. You might be interested in checking out my Quick Sprout Traffic system, with it you receive a 30min call with me and can have me answer any questions you have as well as review your site.
http://www.quicksprout.com/pro/
I’ve just used WP Smush.it to compressed my blog’s images. It really lessens my site’s loading time. Though, I also deactivated the plugin after compressing all the images uploaded for used in my posts.
That is great, glad it is working for you.
Love this blog. This is the one blog I try to read when I get a chance. All the best.
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
Thanks for the helpful tips Neil! I especially appreciate the info on WP plugins that help – definitely plan to install them on my site.
No problem, happy to have been able to help provide you with some useful tips.
Great post Neil, really enjoyed it. Little worried to see that the guys seemed to be looking at that baseball players junk though! Haha
LoL, glad you liked it!
we have been trying several picture compression plug ins and have not had good luck with them working with IE8. have you used smush it on several sites so that you feel it is solid? Will I be bale to test the results prior to “smushing” the photos? If i have done a bunch of compression work on photos already will this alter the results?
Your the man. Look forward to your response.
I have not used smush it but I know that other compression software may do the trick. Let me know if smush it works for you!
The info on losing 7% of your potential conversions for each additional second of download time was great. I knew it was an issue but had never seen any data. Thanks for that.
Slow loading time of the web always frustrate the visitors because they will have to wait at the time of page loading, which will be responsible for less traffic on the site and as a result, the decrease in the conversation will be happened.
That is exactly right.
Thanks John,
With technology today time is everything, and if you waste people’s time even by a few seconds you can lose them.
Hi Neil,
I have a lot of images in my posts, but I never really acknowledged how I could optimize them to get traffic through image searches.
Thanks for the link for the WP Smush.it plugin as well, it will certainly help load times with so many images.
Just a quick note, WP Smuth.it is not compatible with the most recent version of wordpress.
Smush*
Good to know, I didn’t know that.
No problem, glad you found the link helpful.
This is very nice to hear about this plugin from this post. I haven’t tried it before.
Great, now you can give it a try.
Thanks Neil, great tips.
Your posts are some of the most detailed, easy to understand, and helpful SEO Tips I’ve found online.
Thank you for creating and sharing this valuable content.
Walt
Thanks Walt,
I appreciate the kind words.
Thanks dude very useful article I will review all my images again
Sounds good.
Great tips Neil. Any thoughts on how to optimize externally hosted images (for e.g. S2?)
Just link to them and go from there.
Hey Neil! Thanks so much for sharing this with us. I always enjoy reading all the free tips you share. Much success to you!
Thank you Josh,
All the best to you too!
You said “Make sure there are no spaces in your image names. And if you want, you can uses dashes, but avoid underscores.”
Do you have any evidence to support this statement?
Why is dash required?
The dashes allow crawlers to differentiate between terms you want to rank for.
Some great tips as usual. I use the alt tags but never thought of the other tips really. I love how detailed your posts are.
Thanks Neil
Thank you Craig, glad you found these tips helpful.
Thanks for tips Neil! I use alt tag and title tag but I didn’t give too much attention to long descriptions
I will do starting now!
Definitely give it a try and see how it works out for you.
Hi Patel,
Great Post! I followed all your links to dive deep into it. May be took 1 hour to complete this post.
But I think this post is heavily targeted towards WordPress blogs only.
Anyways thanks
Regards
That is great, I hope they have been useful to you.
Hope to try the smush.it plugin for optimizing images on my site. Thanks Niel for mentioning it here.
Definitely do, let me know how you like it.
That’s awesome, I’ve been doing some SEO optimization on my Dodgers photo blog.
I tried Media Fie Renamer but didn’t like how it worked, so I created a fork that was a bit more clean on GitHub. My version will remove the old files (including all generated sizes & regenerate) plus will look through the DB and update links.
I’ll have to check out WP Smush.it though.
Cool, definitely check out Smush.it.
I thought one should use underscores and not dashes, now you say the opposite?
I always use dashes, if you have evidence of it working otherwise I would love to hear it.
I receive nearly 10% of traffic from google images and I really love to optimize ally my images in my blog post
by the way Nice post….
Awesome, happy to hear it.
A good post Neil, with some useful information. I notice that no one has pointed out that alt text for images shouldn’t always be used. The HTML spec says that alt text should only be used when the image conveys information, or more specifically, that the alt text should be blank if the image is purely presentational.
http://www.w3.org/wiki/HTML/Usage/TextAlternatives
So if it is required that the website contains valid, accessible markup, then you shouldn’t just add in alt text willy-nilly.
Thanks for pointing that out to everyone.
Hey Neil,
thanks for this advise. I don’t think often at images. This guide makes many things clear!
No problem, happy this post has helped clear things up for you.
Hi Neil,
Great post, as always. Optimizing your images is an important task, as you’ve outlined here. File name, alt text and image description (using relevant keywords) are good places to start. I was wondering, though, your take on using these various plugins versus manually making the changes. Wouldn’t using many plugins also slow down your website?
Thanks,
Tarun
It is possible for plugins to slow down your sites, so you have to be careful about which ones you choose to use.
Neil, great post! As you pointed out in the comments, knowing how to market will help you optimize better. Photos are especially important for marketing to older online users (a large group that only grows larger as Baby Boomers get older) because the brain shifts to the right/visual side as we age.
I was excited to see your emphasis on showing faces. When Creating Results surveyed mature (40+) consumers about marketing photography, lifestyle pictures showing whole faces proved most motivating. 65% preferred pictures with faces over those tightly cropped images young web designers seem to love.
Thanks for all the links and tips.
Thanks Erin,
Sounds like you have got it.
This is as usual Great writeup to optimize our images hosted on our web-server. What is your opinion if we host all our images on image hosting service like flicker / picasa and link them from our article. I am little bit confused about this, whether this method will bring more traffic to our site as i think it will surely enhance the speed of our site.
~rakesh kumar
It will definitely allow you to have your photos indexed better. It also will give your photos some site authority.
thanks Neil for a detailed article, I also tried to write on this topic but don’t you think generating Image Sitemap File is an essential part ?
I definitely believe a sitemap is essential to any optimization strategy.
This way is really good. using image with alt tag to bring more traffic with this 6 ways is really working.
Thanks, glad to hear it.
Very good article! I knew that it was important to choose good pictures to catch your visitors attention but i didn’t know how important they were for actually driving traffic to your website. I have installed on my wordpress sites a plugin called SEO All In one. I recommend it, it helps you put titles, tags and descriptions on your images.
Cool, thanks for the recommendation.
Thanks a lot Neil, great advice will help me a lot as I optimize http://stocksonwallstreet.net/ to be the best site possible!
Sounds good,
Best of luck!
Very good advice Neil, thanks. Can you please offer an opinion on whether the file name of the image makes any positive impact on its ability or likelihood to come up as a result in “G” “Image Search”. Thanks.
File names definitely make a difference, as mentioned above.
As images appear attractive, they can be handy in driving traffic to your blog.
Yep, that is correct.
nice tip…
currently my site omg-gadgets.com is loading normally
but i think it will cause problem in future as for now my site is quite new with only 5 posts..
as i use atleast 3 images per post in my site..this will be useful..
thanks
Great, keep up the hard work and let me know if you have any questions as you go.
I really agree with you, for me image is the primary focus in your blog, i always try to put myself in everybodys shoes, and i feel more attracted to blogs that give me a fresh image where this image capture my attention and in this way i can get inside in what is about the post…
Yep, an image can be a great assets to attracting new and current readers.
I think a very nice and detailed article.
Compressing the images also increase website speed and its stability.
good job
Thank you, I appreciate it.
Make sure you have a good resource box taking people to your website. Newsletter editors and website owners then take your articles and put them on their site with your link on it and hey, presto. Traffic.
Nice breakdown, thanks for sharing.
this is really a great information about image optimization… i really loved it..
thanks for sharing…
————–
Mann Patel
Thank you Mann, glad you enjoyed it.
I am following your moves from quite some days and notices you are focusing more on Images. These days you are more active on pinterest than anytime.
Yep, images are increasingly becoming more popular to use and share with information.
I did more then 600 photos with smush it…Thanks for this tip..
Awesome!
hey neil i try using smush it to reduce the size of images in bulk … but after reducing the images on first page the plugin stop doing forward work …? any issues in that …
hmm. I’ve never encountered this problem. You may want to contact the creators of the plugin.
Thanks for the tips Neil! I just started using Luminate on one site that I have. Have you heard of this?
No, I have not. I will have to look into it.
I think it is awesome to drag more traffic from image.also theses tatics are great.thanks for sharing.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed them.
I have used the ALT in my images with the WordPress plugin, that always helps too.
Cool, thanks for sharing what has worked for you.
Great tips, images are often overlooked as a seo strategy. Will definitely try tumblr!
Sounds good, I hope you enjoy it!
If I wasn’t hooked by any of your other posts this one tipped the scales. I’ve been a bit lax on my images and love these tips. All images now have higher status in my posts. Also looking forward to Smushit as we’ve got over 100 posts.
Thanks SO much!
Thanks Sheevaun,
I appreciate the kind words. Happy to hear you have found some new and useful tips here.
Tumblr is great if you source your images, otherwise I find it’s just people stealing and rehashing other people’s content.
I agree, it is always important to give credit where credit is due.
This is great post for increasing traffic by blog images. Thanks for share it, I’ll do SEO for my each blog post image and hope it will help me to improve ranking too.
No problem, let me know how it works out for you.
Its cool process Neil to make the readers much more viewable with your image stuffs.
Thanks, glad you like it.
Hi Neil, I love your blog. I wanted to let you know that I tried the WP Smush.it plugin but I am having some trouble and keep getting an error message when I attempt to smush images. I was wondering if you had any other recommendations. I take a lot of up-close food pics and my images are huge – not sure what to do. Any suggestions?
Hmm not quite sure what the problem is there, you may want to try another plugin as it may not be compatible with your WP theme.
Neil, i enjoyed this piece and especially the other one about backlinks. Thanks
Thank you Babajide, I am glad to hear it.
Thanks some more for the information, the bit about peoples eye movement and how they process images differently was pretty interesting.
Thanks Reagan,
Grateful for the kind words.
Hi neil, thanks for this traffic improvement idea, i will re-arrange my all images with alt tags in my web sites. thanks Neil.
Great, I hope it helps.
Hey Neil. Thanks for sharing these images and information so that one can get more traffic with the help of images. You try to cover everything in these images.
No problem, happy to help.
Thanks Neil for showing the right guide of image optimization. Really properly optimized image can help website in both ranking and conversion. This guide has helped me to improve my skill of image optimization. Thanks a lot for this useful article.
I am glad this post has been useful to you.
So far i haven’t been optimizing my images with Seo info like title, description and keywords. Last week i started doing it..and got much more traffic!
Awesome, glad you got started. Keep it up!
Images can be a key traffic booster than many webmasters miss out on or unfortaunately don’t focus on altogether, great post, bookmarked and saved
Thanks Daniel, hope these tips help.
After starting optimizing my images i noticed a small increase of traffic that came directly from google images…so well worth doing it!
Awesome, that is what I like to hear!
Neil,
We are trying optimize the images in our blog page using these techniques.
Thank you so much
Chris
Great, let me know how it goes.
Great tips Neil! There are many website owners out there doesn’t really know the importance of a well seo’ed images for their website. Thanks!
Thanks Arlene, glad you liked it.
hey neil,
good work man. all the tactics related to optimization of images are too much impressive.
Thanks.
Matt
Hi! Neil,,,,,
Great tips or tactics you have share Neil,it helps every one more.The tactics are so very nice,,This post is really great,,
Thanks for sharing,,.