Generating and increasing blog/website organic traffic through optimised images for search engines (steps on how to optimize images for better Google/search engine traffic)

Images are a good source of organic traffic. A new blogger should be aware of how to optimise a blog's image to make the best out of it: to increase organic traffic to your blog.

My intention, today, is to walk us through the process of having our blogs images optimised.

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Because of the changes that Google has made to comply with national trademarks laws, it is now somewhat difficult to download an image through Google search without first visiting the image source (the website or blog). This means increased organic visitors for those websites or blogs.

It is helpful because, even if your page may not be highly ranked on regular Google search, it may be ranked high on Google image search and still bring that treasured organic traffic.

I can attest to the positive impact of optimised image to blog's traffic.

I have this other blog, which I started way back in 2015. I noticed at one point that I was gaining traffic from a combination of keywords. Initially, I thought it was hackers' activity, not until I did a search using those keywords that I found that one of my images on the blog post was Google's chosen image for those searches.

Having imbibed the practice of optimising my images, I have noticed that most of my images appear on Google image search, even where my page is not that highly ranked on regular Google search.)

Steps to optimize your images (with diagrams and illustrations)

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I did not do anything spectacular: I was not publishing through a domain name, nor did I link that blog post to another respected website or blog. I am not saying that these do not help in blog ranking. All I am saying is that simple image optimization can help.

The simple process of optimising blog's images on Blogger:

1. Choose the image that best represents your blog post visually and rename the image to align with the topic of your post:

Once you have identified the image that suitably represents your theme, whether from the internet or otherwise, give it a name that aligns with the topic of your blog post (that is, a name, whether a word, phrase or clause, that best interpretes/describes the topic of that particular post or page).

Example, as in this case, any image I will be adding will have "optimising post image" or similar description as its name, and not a generic image.png or 20181110.jpg name

Naming your images to align with the topic of your blog post serves two purposes: first, it helps optimise the image; secondly, you take ownership of the image with respect to its appearance in Google search for your topic.

2. Populate the image properties appropriately:

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After uploading an image on blogspot hosted blog, you will see some options beneath it. Those options helps you choose your preferred size for the image (small, medium, large, extra large or the original size - usually I go for medium or large), the position of the image ( left, centre or right), the caption and the properties.

Click on the properties. Once done, it will bring out something that looks like the image below. Simply fill in the title text and the "alt" (meaning alternative) title. These describe the images for robot crawls and help search engine robot to identify your images appropriately.

Very importantly, do not forget the "alt" text. "Alt" text makes it possible for Google bots to "see" the image and understand what the image is.

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Other thing to consider in optimizing your image: size and surrounding texts 

In addition to the foregoing, you should also keep an eye on the size of your images. Small images tend to load faster than large image and also consume relatively lower internet data. For this reason, Google usually display those smaller images and rank them higher.

Ensure that words that proceed with the image speaks to specifically to your topic of the post and the "Title" text and "alt" properties of the image.