In my last article I tried to elaborate what SEO is. But that was just a beginner's stuff and written for the basic knowledge about Search Engine Optimization. Now the real question is — how exactly can you perform SEO? Many bloggers keep saying that SEO is really complex thing, it's not a piece of cake and stuffs. Chillax guys! I admit that it isn't a piece of cake, but it's nothing more than 2 pieces of cake, lol. And if you can eat 1 piece of cake, eating 2 pieces of cakes is just a piece of cake for you, right? Anyway, I'm gonna write a series of articles to help you optimizing your blog for better search engine performance. So just stick to TAB. And today in this article you're going to learn how to search engine optimize your blog's images, or say, Seofy the images. So let's dive in.Why optimize images?
The first question that might arise in your mind is why the heck should I optimize the pictures? But buddy, the problem is that the Search Engines like Google, Bing etc aren't smart enough to read images while crawling your blog. They are too dumb to enjoy the aesthetics of a cute girl :}
At blogger blogs, we've to do it ourselves (talking about seofying, not the aesthetics). You might find this painful to manually optimize the images, if you're as lazy as me. But there's nothing we can do about it. I think we all lazy bloggers should unite altogether and have a protest against such merciless, cruel barbarity of these SEs. Anyway till then let's solve this together. Remember united we stand, divided we fall.
Shut up and tell me how to do it.
For now, I'm just showing you the way to optimize the images in a blog post. So firstly open the post which we'll be dealing with. Done? Now here's the algorithm of optimizing an image. Just follow the steps carefully.
1. Fisrt of all, change the image name in your hard disc. The file name matters. The file name should clearly describe your image. And always care to use dashed format while renaming the picture. For example - "how-to-rank-higher-in-google" should do great in a relevant image. Upload the images into the post first. If you're editing an existing post and already placed a picture in it, skip this step.
2. Now click on the image. A group of options should appear below that image. Amongst them click on the Properties. Look at the snap below to scour your confusions.
3. After clicking, a rectangle box will pop. There you'll find two text fields.
Below are the functions of those fields.
- Title Box: Whatever you write here, will be displayed when you hover your pointer over the image. This keeps your readers connected to you. Keep your mouse on the image above, for instance.
- ALT Text: ALT text is the short form of Alternative Text. As I said earlier, most of the search engines can't understand images. So by using this alt text you can provide it information about the pic. Besides, when a browser fails to load the image, the alt text helps the user to understand what the pic is about. For example you're writing an article about cooking pasta. So for an image in that article, you may use - "how to cook pasta in 30 minutes" or something like that. Whatever you use should clearly tell a one-liner story about that image.
Also Read: How to Backup and Restore a Template
Update: Another factor that matters to maintain a great SEO is the image size. First of all, everyone hates a webpage that loads slow, so to keep your readers happy you need to have a fast loading light web page. And secondly, our grandfather Google checks your page loading speed while ranking pages. Hence, the images you use should be low in size. You can compress or resize the pictures cut the extra bit of fat off your image.
Lastly,
That's all. Whenever you write a blog post, keep these two little stuffs in mind. It won't take much time, but it'll give you many things in return. For any queries I'm alive, just comment below. Don't be selfish, share this article with your friends. Cya.
Image Credit: Stuart Miles