Images, The Secret To Improve Your Rankings & SEO Efforts!
Google has a universal search engine now. Basically what this means is depending on the search you conduct you’ll find websites, videos, news articles and images all mixed in the search results. Prior to this they separated the results by type. Universal search makes for a better experience for the users. But more importantly means it’s more ways for you to rank. We’ll focus on images for now.
Most people know the value of performing search engine optimization on a web page. Some people have wised up and gone beyond text and even started creating keyword optimized videos to help their rankings. But not many people are optimizing their images which is your golden opportunity.
Now I’ll be honest the images don’t come up a lot in the regular search results. But some do and the fact is more than ever people are using the image search feature on Google to find pictures related to searches. And no it’s not just naughty pictures, you pervert. There are a lot of people doing searches for products that they want to buy or are thinking about buying. When they do a search they often click on the image results like you do for a regular search. And guess what? Google often just links directly to the page that the image is on! What that translates into, is more targeted traffic to your website. It’s highly targeted because if someone is searching for a specific product image, it’s probably because they are in the latter stages of research and are ready to buy.
The Advantages of Ranking Using Images
- Additional traffic you would have never received.
- Less competition. Most website owners aren’t thinking about optimizing their images. They’re barely thinking about optimizing their pages. So that means you won’t have to worry about fighting them off like you do with PPC or even regular search engine optimization.
- It’s easier to rank high in image searches than it is for regular web page searches. Because it’s under the radar you can easily optimize tons of images.
How To Optimize Images That Rank Well
Step 1: Be descriptive and name your images using the keywords they represent. If you have an image of a Sprint Palm Treo 700p. Then don’t name the image cellphone. Name it exactly what it is. The more keywords that really describe the image, the better chances of coming up in Google’s image search results at the top and possibly the regular search results as well. If you really want to take it up a notch you may want to do some keyword research using Word Tracker’s free tool.
Step 2. Get a Google Webmaster account. Don’t worry it’s free.
Step 3. Submit A Sitemap.
Step 4. Verify you own the site.
Step 5. Enable the Image search feature.
The last step is very important. This will help Google easily find your images which should help them rank faster than having Google hunting them down on the worldwide web.
If you follow these steps you can take advantage of a back door way of getting more traffic to your site. It won’t be a lot but every little bit counts especially when it is highly targeted traffic of people in the right mind set ready to buy! By the way if you think I’m full of crap about this (and I’m highly offended that you might feel that way.) check out where Google admits to this.
Don’t say I never gave you anything! Cheers.
