Recently, we’ve connected with an amazing group of creative entrepreneurs around the Philadelphia area, many of whom are photographers. We were lucky enough to host an SEO and Digital Marketing workshop for this group, during which we quickly realized a large pain point for many small business owners.
[You can download your own copy here!]
The photography industry is extremely competitive, and these entrepreneurs are really looking to hone in on their digital marketing strategy and holistic online presence in order to reach their right audiences and grow their businesses.
So many times as small business owners, we focus most of our time on producing great work for our clients that our own business’ needs take a back burner. That’s why we’re committed to helping you harness the power of your online presence.
Today, we’re sharing our tips for how to optimize your images to increase your chance (or rank) of appearing in Google’s search results. While this is inspired by the needs of our photography-minded friends, these tips are relevant to anyone who is using images on his/her website – which should be everyone.
Getting Started with Sharing Images Online
Upload Your Images
Before Google can share your images on search results, the images must first be online. This may sound simple, but there’s a bit more to it. There is no way to directly upload images to Google’s search results, which means you must first upload your images to a website.
If you don’t have your own website:
2) you can use other tools such as Google+, blogger, flickr, etc to upload your pictures. If you do go this route, it’s vital that your pictures are public and searchable.
Use High Quality Photos
Google cares about its user’s experience – a lot. This means its not going to show blurry, small, or poor quality images as the first search results.
The best practice for uploading images to your website is to use consistent dimensions and a high quality resolution. Here’s the catch: Google hates large images.
Compress and Optimize Your Images
The main problem with high quality images is that they tend to also be very large file sizes. This can have a negative effect on your website’s search presence if these large files start to slow down your website. As of 2010, Google considers website load time a key factor in how it determines your ranking and quality of SEO.
Again – this is all to provide the best experience to the end user. Studies show that the longer a website takes the load, the higher the bounce rate (people leaving your website).
Our goal is to keep people on your website and to make Google happy. To do this, you can use tools like tinypng or compressnow to compress your images.
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights
While you’re compressing your images and reducing your load time, be sure to utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This free tool by Google will grade your website (both the desktop and mobile version) on its speed and user experience as well as provide suggestions for how to improve both.
Index Your Website
Tell Google (and all search engines) that you’re ready for them to crawl your website. Essentially, you want to submit a site map of your website to the search engine. Google will then “crawl” your website for new and updated information using those links. Indexing is the processing of this information – it processes everything from the words on the page, to the heading tags and alt text.
- To submit your site map to Google, you must first verify your site with Google Search Console.
- To submit your site map to Yahoo!, you must sign up for Bing’s Webmaster tools.
For all of our friends using WordPress (this is how we build ALL of our websites – highly recommend!), you can download the Yoast SEO plugin for an easy-to-generate XML sitemap.
One last thing about site maps: Be patient. Indexing and ranking in search engines doesn’t happen over night, and no matter what anyone promises you, there is no quick fix.
There are many factors that go into optimizing your SEO and boosting your search result rank. We hope these are helpful tips to get you started – as always, if you have any questions or need someone to take the job off your hands, you can always email us at hello@shoobiemedia.com!
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this topic: tips for optimizing your images for search engines.