3 Easy Ways Images Can Increase Keyword Relevance and Complement Your SEO Efforts

Today I am going to begin a two part series on images; specifically, I am going to discuss how images can be used to drive more traffic to your blog.

It goes without saying that effective use of images is an important part of creating a blog that is a pleasing and dynamic experience for your reader. However, in my experience, many people overlook the subtle but influential effect that images can have on your efforts to pick up more search engine traffic.

In this post, I will discuss three simple steps you can take to use images as a tool for increasing keyword relevance that will complement your SEO efforts on a specific post or page. My next post will deal with how to optimize images themselves to rank higher in Google Image Search.

The objectives and techniques are vastly differently, so you will want to pay attention to the details.

Determine Your Image Objective

The first thing you need to determine with respect to images in your blog is whether or not you are going to optimize the image itself or use the image as a tool for improving the keyword density of your post. Sometimes these to goals can work hand in hand, but oftentimes they do not.

So how do you know which objective to target?

Simple. Answer this question: what will drive more traffic?

If your post deals with a famous individual, place, or object, for example, you will most likely want to optimize the image itself for search. The image has a good chance of driving traffic on the front page of Google Image results, which search users often look at for famous people or places; additionally, if very well optimized, it could surface on the front page of Google’s regular search results page as one of the four Google Image Search preview images.

Depending on the volume of search for that particular famous person, this could drive a significant amount of visitors to your site over time. We will deal with this in granularity in the next post in this series.

If, on the other hand, you are writing a post about something for which a user typically would not have much use for an image when conducting a search – many of the articles here at H2B are good examples – then you are wasting time optimizing the image itself and should instead be using the image to further optimize your post.

Let’s take a closer look at how to do that with three easy ways you can use images to complement your SEO efforts by increasing keyword relevance.

Using Images as an SEO Tool to Increase Keyword Relevance

Luckily, using images as an SEO tool is a very simple, intuitive process. Here are the steps:

1. Determine your keywords

This should really be done long before you even think about images, which are typically the last element I add to a post.

While you may write some posts without keywords and SEO in mind – and that is perfectly fine, especially if it is not about a popular topic – you need to think strategically if you want to drive search engine traffic.

2. Change image file names to reflect keywords

This is an oft missed opportunity to communicate to search engines what your post is about. Make sure that you name your image file something that fits in with the keywords and theme of your post, even if it is not the most specific way to describe your image.

For example, I have not even considered what image or images I will use in this post. That will come after I’m done writing it. Yet, regardless of what image I choose, I know that the filename will look something like this:

using-images-to-increase-seo.jpg

Notice the dashes; and yes, they are important.

It could be a picture of a bright blue sky with an original filename of bluesky.jpg or a picture of a keyboard with a generic filename like 284756.jpg. Regardless, my post isn’t about either of those topics, so optimizing an image for either “blue sky” or “keyboard” is not feasible. Thus, I couldn’t care less if the filename and image description are optimized for the image itself, but rather I am interested in this meta information helping to bolster the keyword relevance of my post.

3. Use image title and alt text that reflect keywords

Each of these places is another code location where you can include keywords that a search engine will come across. WordPress makes it very easy to dictate the text for each of these with its image editor.

The ultimate image code output that a search engine sees is something like this:

<a href=”http://how-to-blog.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/blog-dad-traffic.gif”><img style=”margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 60px; margin-right: 60px;” title=”blog-dad-traffic – strategies to create successul blog” src=”http://how-to-blog.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/blog-dad-traffic.gif” alt=”strategies to create successul blog” width=”447″ height=”250″ /></a>

This code is taken from an image at the recent post I wrote about strategies for successful blogging.

Notice the text that is italicized. This is the title and alt text for the image. You can see how I’ve included the post’s main keyword phrase here. I did that across each of the four images in the post, which can do nothing but enhance the overall idea I’m trying to get across to search engines, which is that the post is relevant for people searching about blog strategies that will lead to success.

Remember, search engine optimization is very, very intuitive!

Something you might also notice is that my image filename is not wholeheartedly optimized for the post. I do have the words “blog” and “traffic” in there, but I wanted to keep a word or two in there that was actually descriptive of the picture because I was using multiple pictures in the post. It simply helped me keep them straight when I was posting. (The truth is that I wasn’t optimizing that particular post for a highly competitive keyword phrase. Make no mistake, if I was entering a highly competitive arena, the filename would be more keyword specific.)

What is the Impact?

Okay, so you are probably thinking that this is all well and good but wondering how much of an impact it has. To be perfect frank with you, I don’t know. And neither, really, does anyone else.

But I will tell you that I have had a tremendous amount of success leveraging SEO on the blogs I run and competing with much bigger and more popular sites on high traffic keywords. A major part of the reason why, I believe, is paying attention to details like this that the majority of websites do not pay attention to.

The way I look at it is like this:

1. You have to have an image filename; why not make it keyword relevant?
2. Image title and alt text are image description options that are available for use; why not use them and make them keyword relevant?
3. Optimizing the image filename, the image title, and the alt text is not going to hurt you; thus, if making them more keyword relevant is only going to help you to more clearly communicate to search engines what your post is about, why would you waste this valuable real estate in your code?

Try it out and see if it works for you. It can’t hurt.

I’ll be back next week with the second part of this series, which will deal specifically with optimizing the images themselves for search engines.

* – Image credit: SEOYourBlog.com

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Jerod Morris is the Director of Blogging and Social Media for Orangecast, a web marketing firm located in Dallas that specializes managing the online profiles of small- and medium-sized businesses.

Jerod is the managing editor for Corporate Compliance Insights as well as Midwest Sports Fans, where he hosts a podcast, has been a guest on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, makes regular radio appearances, and has hexes named after him.

Follow Jerod on twitter (@jerodmsf) or email him: jerod [at] orangecaster [dot] com.

Tagged as: alt text, images, keyword relevance, SEO