How to optimize photos and attract traffic from image search

isual content attracts users' attention to publications, allows for faster communication of information, and increases the readability of materials. It also serves as an additional source of organic search traffic.

To attract visitors from image search, the marketer must optimize photos and page elements. These actions not only generate traffic, but also increase site load speed and improve usability.

Size matters

Programmers try to create the most functional applications using the minimum required amount of code. Designers strive to make the site visually appealing without overloading it with unnecessary graphic elements. Using photos to visualize publications and attract traffic, the marketer should use the smallest possible picture size without compromising the quality of perception.

The size of the picture does not directly affect the position of the resource in the search results for pictures. However, too large images reduce the speed of page loading. And search engines take into account this indicator when ranking sites in the overall output. Loading speed even refers to critical ranking factors when it comes to attracting mobile traffic.

However, by no means should the essence of photo optimization be reduced to reducing the size of photos to a minimum. When publishing photos, decide how small a photo can be without losing the visual appeal of the page. "Yandex, Google and other search engines value aesthetically pleasing publications. At the same time, they make sure that in the pursuit of aesthetics, sites do not become too "heavy".
Don't look for a one-size-fits-all recipe that will help you determine the right photo size once and for all. The loading speed of pages depends on a number of factors, including the features of the CMS, the speed and current load on the server, etc. Therefore, the marketer must choose the optimal picture size for each site.

You will need the following services to check page load speed and automatically resize photos:

---Google PageSpeed Insights. The world's largest search engine developed this service to help webmasters manage page loading speeds.
Compressor.io. A free set of tools that allows you to reduce the size of photos to increase the speed of page loading.

After determining the optimal size for your site, proceed directly to the search engine optimization images.

How much does an optimized photo cost

If the proverb is to be believed, one picture is worth a thousand words. However, this rule only works if users see this picture on the page of the output. In addition, the price of a photo increases if it helps promote the business as a whole.

Imagine a law firm's website. Do you think an organization of this profile will be able to benefit from promotion with pictures? Or will it just spend time and money to put a tick in the marketing plan and report to the investor on the use of a fashionable way of promotion?

Now imagine a resource that earns on traffic, such as selling banner ads with pay per impression. This site is interested in attracting traffic by almost any means. By attracting users through picture search, the site owner is actually trading the ability to view and copy unique, quality photos for ad views.

If you've decided that promoting with pictures will benefit your business, proceed with picture search optimization. Pay attention to the optimization components listed below.

Uniqueness of photos

You are unlikely to get to the top of search results for pictures if you use repetitive photos from photobanks to promote yourself. Search engines generally do not rank highly for sites that copy someone else's content and do not offer added value to users. This is true for all types of content, including images.

The use of non-unique images can especially hinder the promotion of online stores. By publishing an image of a product borrowed from a manufacturer's site, they can hardly count on a place at the top of the search engine. The fact is that hundreds of other stores have probably already published the same pictures. If you want to attract visitors from image search, use unique photos.

Note that Matt Cutts, a Google engineer emeritus, claims that using images from photobanks has no negative impact on a resource's position in natural search. The largest search engine pays attention to the quality and value of content in general.

Title of photos

When you publish photos, name the files correctly. For example, if you're sharing an image of a Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ smartphone, it makes sense if the file with its image is named samsung-galaxy-note-10plus.jpg, not abracadabra2244.jpg.

Search engines use file names to determine what's shown in the pictures. You benefit from the fact that Yandex and Google understand that it's the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ that's pictured, not some abracadabra.

The alt attribute

Many marketers know the importance of the alt attribute, but most experts use it incorrectly. They tend to fit as many keywords as possible into this attribute.

Pay attention, the alt attribute forms the description of the image, which is displayed on the page if the picture for some reason is not loaded. Therefore, try with 4-6 words (125 characters) as accurately as possible to indicate what is shown in the photo. Put a keyword in the alt attribute, if it can be done naturally.

For example, if you post a photo of the aforementioned smartphone, you could write the following into the alt attribute: Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone (black). Imagine how your page will look if the user sees something like "buy a cheap smartphone in Moscow.

The title attribute

This attribute is responsible for the text that the user sees when hovering the mouse over the image. Search engines do not take it into account when ranking resources, so some marketers do not pay attention to it. However, this attribute should still be used. Firstly, the display of text with a description when you hover your cursor over the image improves the usability of the resource. Secondly, if today search engines do not take into account the title attribute in the ranking, it does not mean that they will not change their position in the future.

Page content

When ranking resources in image search, search engines consider not only factors directly related to the photo. Search engines are evaluating the photo page as a whole, including text descriptions, captions to the image, etc. They strive to determine the relevance of the picture to the user query, and it's difficult to do so only with the name of the file and alt attribute.

For example, a page on which only a photo of the smartphone mentioned above is published is unlikely to rank higher than a page with the same photo and a useful description of the gadget for the audience.

Search engines need context that allows the photo to rank in searches based on images. That context is textual content. So illustrate text with photos and surround photos with good text.

Semantic markup

The world's largest search engines, including Yandex and Google, use Schema.org to structure web pages and improve search results. Use Schema.org markup for images to improve your search results for images. To do this, fill in the Image URL, Thumbnail, Title, Caption, Description, Height, and Width fields on your site.

How to quickly optimize all the photos on your site

Pay extra attention to photo optimization if promoting in search by images is beneficial to your business. Start by determining the optimal size of published images for your site. After that proceed to the actual search engine optimization.

Publish only unique photos. Correctly fill in the alt and title attributes. Surround the photos with high-quality and useful text. Do not forget about the semantic markup. Optimizing each photo will take you a few minutes. Imagine how much time you'll spend to optimize 1000 images. If you want to solve this problem quickly, take time for each photo during publication.