Putting together a viral blog post is more than just the content you write. How much traffic drive to your blog or website can increase drastically based on the images you use.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words…well when used correctly in your blog posts, it could be worth thousands of visitors. In an increasingly visual social media space where everything is about grabbing the attention of your dream customers and making a strong first impression, your visuals play an important part in your ability to connect with your community.
So today, I want to share with you one thing you must do to every image you upload to your blog….(but only you want more traffic!)
WHY OPTIMIZING YOUR BLOG PHOTOS MATTER
Images make your content more engaging and colorful. It breaks up your content, helps you get your point across and can contribute to the SEO of your posts. If you’re not sure what SEO means, it’s short for search engine optimization and it simply the things you do to get your content seen at the top of the search engines (think Google and Pinterest). These “things” can include using targeted keywords in your blog post title, post URL, body text, tags, and metadata.
And while many bloggers do all of these things right, a lot of them still fail to optimize their blog images. Remember, you blog images show up on Pinterest, Google and all the other social media platforms you are using to market your business, so it’s important to get this right because it can literally make all the difference in whether you get a little bit of traffic or tons of traffic.
So, here’s how to do optimize your blog images…step by step!
STEP 01 | RENAME YOUR BLOG IMAGES
When you’re ready to upload your images make sure you use a long tail keyword in the image filename. For example, if we want to rank for the keyword “best blog planner” you’d want to name your image best_blog_planner.jpg BEFORE you even upload the image to your media library within WordPress or Squarespace.
You want to rename your images because when people use the Google image search or search for specific keywords on Pinterest, Google and Pinterest are going to match your image to their search by relevancy. So if someone types in “best blog planner”, the likelihood that your image will show up in their search results is greater than if your image was named “image_1234.jpg”. If you don’t do this step, you’re losing a prime opportunity to get found.
STEP 02 |
Once you’ve uploaded your image to your blog post, you’ll want to add some additional information. To do this you’ll need to “Edit” your image to add your keyword to the title and alt text of your images on your blog.
For example, you can see I uploaded the image, which I have renamed “best_blog_planner.jpg” into WordPress. You can also see that there are a few different fields that we can fill in. We have the URL and you can see in the title and alt text sections, I added my keyword “Best Blog Planner” – which is now going to add an extra boost for SEO when somebody searches for this keyword.
STEP 03 | OPTIMIZING YOUR IMAGE DESCRIPTION
So another place you can improve your SEO in in your image description. You’ll want to use your long tail keyword (ex. “best blog planner”) in your meta description, which should be 1-2 sentences that describe what your post is about. This is also the description that will pop up on your pin in Pinterest and in the Google search results.
STEP 04 | GIVING YOUR IMAGE TITLES A BOOST
Your title and alt text should have around 200 characters to be best optimized for Pinterest but I also recommend including the following elements to ensure you are optimized across all the search engines:
- Your URL or Pinterest handle OR
- Hashtags (optional, Pinterest etiquette is to only use 1-3)
A SIDE NOTE
Now if you already have images uploaded to your blog, DO NOT change the URL of your image links. WHY? It’s going to change all of your URLs that are already indexed by the search engines and your old URLs are no longer going to work. You CAN update all of the title, alt text and descriptions of your older images (which I highly recommend you do) but just don’t edit the links.
STEP 05 | CHECKING OUT HOW IMAGES SHOW UP ON PINTEREST
So now that you’ve updated your images and published your blog post, whenever someone goes to pin your image on Pinterest this is what they are going to see…and your cute “search engine optimized” title text will show up in the description! Boom!
If you aren’t using Pinterest for your business right now, my goal is to change that for you and help you start using it to boost both your traffic and your profits. So my friend, let’s get “pinning” and while you’re hanging out there, feel free to follow my boards at http://pinterest.com/andreabolder.
