Many bloggers and site owners place all of their time and energy into creating relevant content so that they get ranked higher in search engines. What most individuals fail to see is the importance of optimizing images so that they perform well in Google Images. In this article, we are going to discuss why this technique is so important and how you can begin applying it to your own images.

Why it Works
Photos can serve a blog or website in many ways. It helps break up the text, it encourages engagement from visitors, and it is overall, more visually appealing. However, photos have even more strength: they can help increase traffic to your site. For example, if someone types in “Football” into the Google Image search bar, then hundreds of photos are going to show up.

If you can somehow manage to make yours one of the first ones shown, then you have systematically generated another source of traffic (for free). Google as well over ten billion images and this number is growing every day. More and more people are going to start looking towards visual media as a source of entertainment so this is a technique which definitely has the potential to attract customers.

What Photos Should I Optimize?
In short, you should optimize all of your photos! While this may take a long time and require a lot of energy, it will definitely be worth it in the end. If you are just starting out, then you can simply do this as you post images to your site. Some webmasters prefer optimizing stock photos because they generally thrive in the quality department and are more likely to catch the eye of someone who is browsing around Google Images?

While stock photos aren’t free, they stand a much better chance of being seen on the web. This is because they have much more vivid detail. You can browse hundreds of them on various online marketplaces until you find the one you are looking for. Most of them range from one to five dollars. Check out some retouching video tutorials to learn how to design quality images yourself.

Labeling Your Images
One of the first steps for optimizing any photos is to name the filename correctly. Google Images has a difficult time identifying what your image is about if you don’t tell them what it is. Basically, your job is to tell the search engine about your image in the most “SEO-friendly” way possible. Regular filenames are not likely to be ranked at all by a search engine.

For example, a file named “JPG1234” isn’t descriptive at all. A simpler way to help this image be found by Google is by naming it “Small white baseball”. This way, the search engine directory knows what it is looking at and can rank it accordingly. Never use underscores (_) when separating the words in your title. Instead, use dashes to separate the words (-). Basically, the previous example would look like “Small-white-baseball”.

Tagging Images
This step is even more important than naming the files. In this step, we want to use the image title and the Alt-tag to describe the image to the best of our ability. If you can, try to use the same tag you are using in the blog post or article you are posting in. For example, if your blog is about baseball bats, then you should include this somewhere in the description of your image as well. There are video tutorials for Photoshop which teach you how to design your own quality images.

Make sure that you don’t have too many words or it will come off as spam. All you really need for this method to be effective is three to seven highly optimized keywords. Make each word as powerful as possible. This means avoiding minuscule words like “The”, “And”, and “With”.  While this isn’t a huge issue in terms of getting your image ranked, it still plays a small role- and all of the small roles put together can create a highly optimized image.

About the Author: James Martell is a self-made entrepreneur who has recorded tons of success on the Internet. He teaches other students how to do the same via affiliate marketing podcasts, eBooks, and live online seminars. This article was written by a guest author. Would you like to write for us?