Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is the best way to increase traffic to your blog.Though you have many posts,without knowing the basic rules of SEO you cant get more traffic.Most of the new bloggers will be afraid of hearing this term SEO. Search Engine Optimization is nothing but maintaining quality,consiseness and clarity.
Coming to Image Optimization 20% of the daily searches are images.That means if you optimize images properly then you can get more traffic from what you are getting now.
Frankly speaking as I always say blogger blogs are very poorly optimized than wordpress blogs.It doesn’t mean that blogger blogs cant be optimized like wordpress blogs but you have to put some extra effort and need to be a pro in Blogspot. So lets get started with Image Optimization Tips and Tricks.
What are the Disadvantages of Blogger when coming to image optimization:
- In Blogger there is no such plugin or widget using which you can give alt title tags for the images.
- You cannot compress the image size automatically.
- In Blogger blogs there is no way to crop images to fit the layout of the blog.
These are the major disadvantages of default blogger platform taking into consideration of Image Optimization.There are few other disadvantages which you will understand after reading the whole article.
In this article I will be explaining all the Tips using which you can make your images very much SEO friendly and you will be overcoming all the above disadvantages.
How To Make Images SEO Friendly in Blogger Blogs?
1.Resize Images Properly:
I see most of the newbies upload images directly without cropping the images.After uploading a image to blogger it will give you few options like Medium,Original,Large and X-Large.Always keep original size because if you use the other options like Medium or Large then image quality will be lost.
- The best tool I recommend you for cropping images online is cropp.me.
- For offline cropping and editing Adobe Photoshop is the best tool which I regularly use.
2.Compress Images Before you Upload to Blogger:
Blog load time is one of the important factor.So to reduce the load time of the blog you have to upload images which are light weight.
If you upload any image to blogger by default blogger takes the original size of the image and it will have a huge impact on your blog load time.
So,first you have to compress images using Yahoo Smushit.
- I always see that Yahoo Smushit goes down and takes alot of time for uploading and downloading.
- The best alternate tool for smush.it is Puny.Png.I was using this tool since couple of weeks and has a great compression ratio.I personally feel this tool is far better than Yahoo Smushit.
3.Add Alt Title Tags for Images:
Alt Tag:If your image goes down or becomes unavailable then the image space will be filled with this Alt Tag.
Title Tag:When you hover over a image.The keyword(s) appearing on the image is the Title Tag.
Alt Title tags play a very important role for better ranking of your images in Search Results.
After you upload a image to Blogger then go to HTML and Add A Alt and Title tag as follows.
When you upload an image then HTML code looks like the following
You have to make the following changes to make it SEO friendly
This is the manual method of adding Alt and Title tags.In my next post I will introduce a Script which automatically adds alt title tag for images.
4.Give proper names to Images:
I see most of them give image name as image1,image2 etc or 1,2,3 so on.But this is not the right way to optimize your images for better Search Engine Ranking.
You can see how the url of the image looks like.For example if you are explaining a post on Tiger and you will name it as image25.After uploading see the below link how your url looks like.
Now image25 and Tiger are no where similar and you dont get any result for this on Search Engines.
So you have to name your picture as Tiger instead of image25 for better Search Engine Optimization.See how the url looks like after you replace the name with Tiger.
5.Avoid Giving Spaces for Images and Pictures names:
For example if you are writing a post on Making Money Online and you want to show a image that resembles Making Money Online.
Now you will give name as Making Money Online.But it is recommended to avoid spaces because these spaces are generally replaced by %20 and doesn’t has any value when it comes to SEO.So, it is better to replace space with ‘-‘ or ‘+’.