Everyone knows that your blog post needs eye-catching images to help capture the interest of the reader. Using the right images can keep visitors on your page longer and generate more traffic. Unfortunately most authors simply upload images without thought to proper image optimization.

Handy Image Optimization Tips

The goal of inbound marketing is to drive traffic to your website in order to convert them into leads. Including quality images in your content gives your brand the opportunity be more visible on social media, encouraging more engagement and click through back to your website. Visuals can:

• Help you tell a story
• Project your expertise
• Break up your writing for easier consumption
• Send a message
• Evoke an emotion
• Help raise visibility for your content

But using the image without optimizing it first wastes an opportunity for even more visibility. SEO is not just about optimizing the text on a page. You need to take advantage of all on-page elements that can help drive traffic to your content, both textual and visual.

The next time you are writing your blog post, use these image optimization tips to ensure you get the best results from your images.

Find The Right Images

Using images just for the sake of having an image in your post doesn’t really help your cause. Your image needs to support the content that surrounds it.

Size Your Images For Speed

Page load speed is important to both humans and the search engines. A page loaded with large images will load slowly, causing visitors to quickly hit the back button. This sends a signal to the search engines about the quality of your website, potentially lowering your website’s rank in the search engine results.

Use Your Metadata Wisely

We sometimes think of the search engine bots as “human” – i.e. they can read and understand our online content. But when the search engines are indexing your site, they can crawl through your site and read all of your text but are unable to read images. To help search engine bots understand the relevance of your images to your content, provide descriptive text using the metadata. This information will help them index your images appropriately.

Image optimization is an easy but important task that can make a difference on whether your images get indexed and lead visitors back to your website.