Blogging is one of the easiest ways to express your opinions and reach out to a large audience in the virtual space. If you are already a blogger or decide to become one in near future, here are a few points you should keep in mind to draw traffic to your blog:
HOW DO I ATTRACT TRAFFIC TOWARDS MY BLOG?
Well there are a lot of ways really to do that. One very important factor is Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Well if you know what SEO is, use it to get more page views on your blog and if you don't, you are about to!
What is SEO?
Well the technical definition of SEO is this: 'Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website on organic ("natural" or un-paid) search engine result pages (SERPs), by incorporating search engine friendly elements into a website'.
In simple terms, you need to add elements to your website that will render search engines to catch your website quickly and thus improve your index on mainstream search engines like Google, Bing, yahoo, etc. The higher your index, the higher will your website appear when a person searches for a specific term, information that your website provides. So basically, if you want your page to be ranked higher by Google, you need to take care of some basic SEO pointers. One of them is optimizing images on your webpage. We'll get into that straight away.
In this article we are going to discuss one such factor which is usually ignored i.e. the IMAGES on your website. Now you'd say "what? Images on my webpage? How do they affect SEO?"
Well, yes they do! And here's all the necessary stuff you need to do in regards with the images of your website to ensure they are caught quickly by search engines. Optimizing images on your webpage is like optimizing a sub-section of your website. It seems useless but it's very important.
1. Choosing the correct image: Now, this is really important. You cannot just attach random images to your articles. They need to be relevant, related to the content you've written. You can find a variety of free images from flikr.com and freeimages.com. Animated GIFs can be added likewise.
2. Making images ready for use: Again, just getting the right images is not enough.You need to:
Put the correct file name: Image SEO begins with the right file name. By default, your system will save the image as something like 'img1212.jpeg'. Now, it's your duty to change the file name to relevance i.e. it should be named after whatever the image reflects. If your image is of a footballer, for example Ronaldo in a Portugal jersey, the name should be ronaldo-portugal.jpeg.
Scale the Image: The loading time of a web page is a really important factor to get readers to stay on your blog. Images with huge sizes will take more time to load on the blog as compared to smaller images. It's human tendency to leave a page if it's not loading quickly or images are taking much longer to load. This is a critical factor for e-commerce websites to consider. But bear in mind that rescaling the images won't reduce its size.
Reduce file size: This can be done by using tools like ImageOptim or websites like JPEGMini. Analyze what type of image file you want, whether you prefer a JPEG or PNG or any other.
3. Image positioning: You just can't add images anywhere in your blog post. They should be present at relevant places, ideally along side or above the content that it describes.
Captions: The caption of the image is the text that accompanies the image. Wondering why and how captions are useful for SEO? People use that text mentioned in the caption while scanning an article online. Next to headings, people tend to scan the image and include the caption as well in that scan.
Alt text or tags is another way that search engine helps in determining what your image is about. Unlike traditional web content, search engines can't determine the text content of an image. As a result, search engines need to rely on captions around the image, alt text, file names and other surrounding text. Adding descriptive text in the alt tag helps the search engines determine what the content of the image is. If an image is used as navigation, ie as a link to another page, be sure to use alt text that is meaningful to the content of the page being linked to.
4. Open Graph: It's another great feature that'd help with your SEO. Add the correct image tag to your social section like this:
This makes sure that your image is included when you share your post on social media.
Use image Site Maps: Web crawlers can't crawl images that are not called out in the webpage source code. In order to let them know about these images, you must list their location in an image Site Map.This can be done using Google Webmaster tools. Follow these Sitemap guidelines that Google suggests when creating a Site Map with image information. Although using Sitemaps don't guarantee that your images will get indexed by Google, you can absolutely increase the optimization of your website, and especially the images by using Sitemaps.
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