How to Optimize Blogger Images for Better Search Engine Rankings

Monday, 7 April 2014

How to Optimize Blogger Images for Better Search Engine Rankings

SEO TIPS AND TRICKS

Whenever a user searches for a topic related to your blog, you'd want Google to show pages from your blog on top of the search results. To do this, we need to help search engines by optimizing blog content in the right way. Simple, right? I've already given some simple tips to optimize Blogger blogs for search engines but this post is exclusively about images. A lot of bloggers post several images in a single post and these images can bring tons of traffic from search engines like images section of Google. This is really easy once you know what to do. Here are some tips to optimize your blog images for good rankings in search engine results.

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #1: Reduce Image Size to Make Page Load Faster

Our first step is to keep image size as small as possible. No one appreciates a slow loading website. Even Google takes the page loading speed in account while ranking a webpage. Luckily, free online tools are available to do all the heavy lifting. Here are my favorite ones.

1- Yahoo! Smush.it

This is an awesome little tool to dramatically reduces image size. Just upload your image from your computer or paste the URL if image is already online and click the Smush button. It will return optimized version of your image in a couple of seconds. Here is the result of a sample image:

2- Kraken.io

Kraken.io offers a desktop software but they also offer an online service for free and their result is quite impressive. Just open their Web Interface and upload your image from computer or paste a URL. One extra option is to chose between LOSSLESS and LOSSY optimization techniques. LOSSLESS will only reduce size and doesn't affect quality while LOSSY will remarkably reduce image size and have minimal impact on the image quality. If your site is not based on crystal clear images then chose LOSSY here. Anyway, I've uploaded the above screen shot [size: 48 KB] in Kraken and optimized with LOSSLESS and LOSSY. Check the size reduction.

ALSO READ : How To Add Bing or Google Maps To Pinterest

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #2: Use Descriptive Names for Images in Plain English

Always name your images in a descriptive manner. This will help search engines to identify what they are about. For example, I've just downloaded this image from a site and its name was file7561245026222.jpg.

Now think about this. Can make any sense out of image's original name file7561245026222? I've renamed this image to African Giraffe in Jungle before uploading. This is common sense and tells search engines about image content.

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #3: Use Alt Tags

Alt tags are simply alternative text. When a browser can not open an image, it displays the text inside alt tag. By default, Blogger does not add any alt tag when an image is uploaded. You need to do it yourself. To do this upload an image.after uploading click on the image,it will show you many options like change size of image,remove and properties.just click on properties and write whatever you want to write in ALT TEXT box...Like just above image's name is African Giraffe In Jungle But When you will hover your mouse on this image it will show you a different name which is only African Giraffe....you can write any name ..

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #4: Chose Blogger Image Upload Options Sensibly

When you finish uploading an image in a Blogger post, the editor prompts you for the size and position of image before placing it in the post. These are critical options and should be chosen wisely. If you are uploading a high resolution digital image then DO NOT select Original size as option because Blogger will actually load full image every time the post loads. HDR images have significant size and your page can take too much time to load.Images with High Resolution should be sized Medium.Any user can click that image to make it Large

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #5: Create Images in Compressed Formats

If you create images yourself then make sure to save them in a good compressed format before uploading. For large high resolution photos, I usually prefer JPEG [.jpg] format. However, PNG [.png] is also a good format for small images like icons. Most softwares like Adobe Photoshop provide option to directly export/save an image in these formats. Remember to avoid GIF [.gif] images as they have large size and does not provide great quality.

Blogger Images Optimization Tip #6: Do Not SPAM & Avoid Getting Banned/Demoted from Google

Google has some very powerful and intelligent algorithms to detect spamming and unnatural stuff on a webpage. For example, if you are posting a celebrity pic on a blog which has nothing to do with celebrities or fashion, search engines would understand that. Similarly, do not over-stuff alt tags text like for above giraffe image:

alt="giraffe in Africa, Giraffe Eating Grass, Male Giraffe, Female Giraffe, Africa, Jungle, Safari"

DO NOT do this. These actions can get you banned from Google results for an indefinite amount of time. Try to be as natural as possible. Always write quality original articles and post high quality images.

I hope these tips would be helpful to you. If you have any questions, let me know