Get Your Webpage Images to Help You Rank Higher in Google
There are several things you can do to get webpages with images and images to rank well from an SEO perspective. First, never just title it image 1, image2, or something like that. This does you absolutely no good at all SEO-wise. You want to keyword research the image name of the.jpeg and make it a useful keyword phrase putting hyphens between each word in the phrase which makes it easier for Google to distinguish between the individual words themselves – and Google Help recommends this by the way.
The title name for your image should be researched as well – and if you are using a tool such as Dreamweaver to build your webpage, using the image description feature to insert your Title Name will also give you an added bonus of having it appear on a webpage screen in a message box when you hover over the image as well – a nice little added marketing spot you can use on your webpage.
Be sure to fill in the Alternate Title as well – Google looks at both so be sure that both titles complement each other from an SEO keyword perspective. Both names must be useful for a single search query or you get no SEO search value at all.
Another useful thing to do with your image is actually make it “Anchor Text” by putting a hyperlink behind it. I often have my images hyperlink to other pages on my site thus strengthening my “Internal Links” which Google looks for when their Googlebot crawler searches your site for indexing purposes – and this also improves your site SEO.
Then to really have it kick ass from an SEO perspective, instead of hyperlinking behind it to another page, link it to a video you have created on YouTube and update your sitemap.xml file to include this webpage as a video page reference in your sitemap.xml file. Be sure after your sitemap update has been approved to use the “Fetch as Google” tool in the Google Webmaster Toolkit to request the page to be re-indexed within Google.
This will speed up your SEO improved rankings within Google for this page. Video sitemap records within Google they say can rank as much as 50 times better than non-video pages. Not sure if this is just a rumor or not, but I am betting there is some truth to this as I have been finding my video included pages being found more frequently through Google Search when I am checking out my Google Analytics records.
Best of luck with your efforts in trying to rank well in Google in 2017.
