Diversify Your Backlink Portfolio With Optimized Image Links [Tutorial]
With respect to Google’s vicious Penguin updates and the crack-down on over-optimized anchor text, it’s now more important than ever to diversify your site’s backlink portfolio. How? you might ask.
Beyond the obvious ways of using more natural and variant anchor text, as well as ensuring your link sources are legit, you can include optimized image links in your SEO link building arsenal.
What Makes an Image “Optimized?”
In the SEO profession, “optimized” is a fancy-pants way of saying “includes your keywords.” So, when you’re building optimized image links, simply name the image to reflect your targeted keyword phrase.
To take image optimization one step further, you can “optimize” the image’s properties. You’ll have to forgive me, Mac users, but this simple tutorial is focused on Windows users.
Let’s pretend your keyword target is “wicked awesome widget.” Here’s the process you’ll want to use to optimize the image properties.
1. First, make sure you have saved the image file as a JPEG (or .jpg file). I have encountered difficulty optimizing “.png” image files. Also, ensure the name of the image reflects the keyword target, “wicked-awesome-widgets.”
2. Locate the folder in which the image is saved. Right-click the image and click “Properties” near the bottom.
3. Click “Details” in the row of tabs at the top of the window.
4. Now, let the image optimization begin. Simply add your keyword “wicked awesome widget” in the Title, Subject, Tags, and Comments fields.
5. For the Tags field, you can include keyword variations, like “wicked awesome widgets” or just “awesome widget.” You can also include yourself or your company as the author if you own the image.
6. Lastly, click “Apply” near the bottom and your image is now optimized!
The next step is to put your optimized image to use. Perhaps you wrote a product review blog post about the “wicked awesome widget” and want to include the image (and image link) in the article. Adding the image and link in page copy all about wicked awesome widgets would be totally awesome.
The SEO Benefits of Image Optimization Beyond Building Links
In addition to a link building context, optimizing images is also effective for on-page SEO. In short, this process helps to increase the keyword relevancy of pages.
Additionally, optimized images can appear in Google image search, which can also send in-market search engine users to your website.
Going the extra mile with image optimization is a clutch for almost all applications of SEO, spanning from local to ecommerce. So, don’t get lazy, my friend. Optimize those images before uploading them to your website, and empower its SEO potential.
