How to use images to increase website Traffic

Content marketers know that SEO, keywords, and good content layout generate website traffic.

Using images the right way is another manner to increase your website traffic.

Often forgotten, images are also content on their own, although we use them to illustrate our idea. They are a very important part of the content. People are always searching for your work for written content. They also consciously (and unconsciously) looking out for visuals.

Here some tips about what you could do...

Adding an image to your blog post 

Add at least one image to your blog post (also useful for social sharing) and keep them relevant to your content.

Images make content easier to read and to connect with. This you will observe when going through other people's articles yourself.

Optimize your image

Optimizing your image is a must do, to keep up your website speed. Not optimized images will slow down the loading speed of your page.

Also, you want your images to be as large as possible yet take up as little storage space as possible.

if you use WordPress as your content system management then there are several plugins that see to that need.

Edit file name

When saving images they usually come with default names that contain a mix of letters and numbers . They are not human friendly. It is good practice for both human and SEO to rename your images with names unique to your article. They should tell more about your content.

Modify your alt tag

Avoid leaving your alt field unattended to. They are a part of metadata; they tell your search engine about your images. Renaming your alt tag will help search engines rank your image and also show your content. Pay attention to your image alt description. It should contain your keyword.

Use relevant images

When you want to spice up your blog post with images make sure those images are relevant to your content and brand. It will increase your traffic. Also, it will reduce your bounce rate to the barest minimum.

You need to use images that closely correlate with your topic.

Let's say you promote a singing course and your blog post is about "Sing like Lady Gaga" and you use a picture of her, people who will Google her name and come to your site will want to read about the latest entertainment news or even gossip about her. Not about some singing course.

Use a relevant keyword

Like your text content, images also have focused keywords.

Inserting your keywords in the alt tag, and the description area of the image makes a lot of difference.

The ratio of Google Images traffic to Google Web Search traffic

How much traffic do Google Images get? I don't know... does anybody know?

I had to dig deep to find some kind of answer:

"This is not a publicly disclosed statistic, but you may also be interested to know that Google Insights for Search (our advertiser focused trends tool) lets you see the relative popularity of search terms on Google Images".

Nate Smith, Former Product Manager on Google Images (answer on Quora in 2010)

So yes, use images

People are using Google Images Search for all kinds of things — such as looking for products.

Google Images Search has hundreds of millions of users since 2010 and still growing each day.

My point is this, it is an untapped mother lode of potential traffic for your website.

Good use of images will also make a lot of difference in getting traffic to your website.

If you did zilch to tap into it. I hope this article will change that.

All the best,

Luc

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