When the Internet first came about it wasn’t all that common to have low quality pictures. It would take a 56K modem a lot of minutes to download some of the high-quality photographs uploaded today. Images now make up about 5.7% of all Google searches. That’s a lot of people searching a lot of photos. Proof that high-quality images can improve your website’s SEO. However, a lot of top websites are claiming that they are not taking advantage of this path.

If images are hosted under a cookieless domain than that is one less needless bit of information that is being sent. Cookies are tiny data pieces being sent from the web pages’ server. They may be small, but it’s unnecessary information being sent with every photograph.

Ensure hat your image’s file name is meaningful. You don’t want a picture of a chair to be called, “er3333rr333.jpg”. Search engines should be able to recognize the picture by the file name. Details of location and relevance to your site’s needs are important to consider as well.

Site speed has also now been added as a variable Google considers for their site rankings. A higher speed can ensure faster downloads, thus increasing traffic and business. Location, equipment, and proper cache management are all ways to improve a website’s download time. Photographs that take an hour to download, or maybe even a few minutes, will get severely less traffic than the website that delivers information quickly.

Add social media tools to your photographs. “Liking” a photograph on Facebook automatically downloads the photograph to Facebook and increases the number of uses who see the photograph. A huge percentage of image Bot requests are derived from Facebook “Likes” off of websites.

There are many different ways to boost your SEO. It’s clear that photographs are becoming an increasingly relevant part of the Internet. Naturally, this means that optimizing your page’s images and their potential to increase traffic is vital to your site’s success.

 

Source: econsultancy