When text content is king in Google, images are often overlooked for their SEO value. However, just look around Facebook, Reddit, tumblr, Instagram, StumbleUpon and all over the internet in general and you will see that image content is incredibly popular. The old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is truer than ever from a user's perspective.
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So how do images help your SEO efforts? You shouldn't write 1000 word alt tags, you're not likely to make friends with search engines doing that. Links are the cornerstone of the SEO process and images can help you get them!
Getting links through great image content certainly isn't a new idea. Just look at how infographics have proliferated across the internet in recent years. Going out of your way to generate awesome image content as a small to medium-sized business is not likely to be high on your list of marketing tactics. But SMB websites often have images that they created to show off their products and services.
These images might be just what someone else is looking for to use in their own work. Of course as a business owner, you might be concerned that your images will be used by competing businesses, or you won't get any attribution as the original author. Thanks to open licensing like that provided by Creative Commons you can share your work safely and openly, ensuring that you are only permitting it to be used under the circumstances that you specify.
For link building purposes, specify that any use of the image must be accompanied by attribution. If you're concerned that your images might get used for commercial purposes, you can specify that only non-commercial use is permitted. Don't want your images modified? You can say that you only want the work to be shown in its original form.
The next step is to get your images out there. Of course you can just say on your site that the images are available for use under a specific license, but this may not get noticed. Fortunately, there are a variety of websites that make it easy to provide your images for use under easily controlled licensing. A great example of this is flickr. If you take a look at flickr advanced search you will see that you can actually search within flickr for images that are available under creative commons.
Just by adding your images to these sites you will get links back to your site (though these are often “nofollowed”) and may send some quality traffic, even if your images aren't used by others elsewhere online.
For best results, make sure you make the highest quality version of images available, give the images descriptive titles and associated text, and restrict the terms of use as little as possible. Also make sure that the images you're sharing are ones that you actually do have the rights to share yourself. Stock photography that you bought from someone else is likely ineligible for instance.
There are lots of other options to make use of image content for link building and promoting your website. Just take a look around online for more ideas. For instance this image link building post has some great alternative ideas and a big list of image sharing and bookmarking sites.
on
This is definitely a good article for someone starting a site. I noticed the more images I had, the more likely people would find my site. It was also cool typing in the site’s name and finding all the images in my articles.
on
I love using images for blogging! I think images are very valuable to a blog because they can be a conversation starter. They get the attention of your audience and give them a reason to read your content. Sharing images are becoming more and more popular these days. An article is always more interesting to read when there’s a picture associate with it.
on
Agreed! Images are no more segregated with ALT tags, SEs are now taking it to much efficient level, where users attracted and en-cashed. 🙂
on
Images plays a very important in today’s content marketing. It easily goes viral.It is advisable that every post you have it must be accompanied by an image. It is effective and proven by many bloggers out there.
on
When I have implemented images in my post on my blogs, I always use a descriptive title. That way, I can get small amounts of traffic to my blog posts. Same things goes to my web 2.0 blogs, I use creative common images, write a nice SEO quality post, and add a link to my main website to create a niche-related backlink.
on
I have been using images from the very first time I wrote a blog post. Maybe this has something to do with my past experience as a newspaper sub-editor. Images opens up windows of relief in walls of text. However in the context of websites, there has to be some changes in the way images are presented. For one, having an image of the highest resolution is not always the best choice. Hi-res images take longer to load and lower page load speed increases the bounce rate. It’s more practical to have a thumbnail which the reader can click on to view the original image.
on
I actually hadn’t started to think of images as a useful way to get traffic until I began to use Pinterest more often. People were using that Social networking site for everything, from getting backlinks to their own blogs and websites, to getting people to click their pictures and redirecting them to their affiliate products.
Sadly, Pinterest has stopped users from linking pictures to affiliate sites/products, but people shouldn’t let this deter them. Pinterest is still an awesome way to generate traffic back to your site, and all through the power of images.
on
Images are the unsung hero of SEO these days. You have to put images in your text if you want to create interesting content let along trying to make Google and the other search engines happy. Great post! Thanks for the awesome tips.