Images can help blog posts in a few different ways. An image can break up long pieces of content. An image can make content not seem as intimidating. An image can add a visual example to a point you’re trying to make in an image. An image can draw in attention to the post when a new visitor takes a quick glance at the page.
An image can even bring in some referral traffic from search. This mostly comes from Google Image Search.
Recently I’ve changed the way I optimize images for people and for search and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the information. It’s pretty basic, but I think in the long run it will be a better experience for readers.
How to Optimize a Blog Image for Search
Let’s just take this step by step in an example.
Here is an image from iStock. Back a few years when I first started blogging I focused on the theme of the photo when naming the image. So I would have called this one something like “Woman Magnifying Glass”.
The issue I ran into with this strategy is I would get all traffic to the site from Google Image Search for terms like “Woman Magnifying Glass”. That person is in fact looking for an image like that and they’ll probably be happy when they find the image, but it’s really not relevant traffic to the site.
The new strategy is to focus on the blog and the blog post.
That’s why the name of the image now relates to the post or in this case “Optimize Image Blog Post”. The title of the image is “How to Optimize Blog Post Images”.
The idea is that people searching for a relevant keyword on Google will find the image and see the relevant post. It might mean less traffic to the site, but it should mean traffic more relevant to the site.
That’s the ultimate goal. You want a lot of traffic, but only after you know you’re getting relevant traffic. I’d rather have 2 potential leads from 5 visitors instead of 0 potential leads from 100 visitors.
What is your blog image strategy?