Using Image Metadata to Boost Your Local SEO : Tips and Trick

Are You Seeking Extra Traffic? Are you trying to find ways to boost your local SEO?

One sure-shot way to achieve this is to Optimize Your Images!

Including images on a website is essential to create an appealing visual experience. Using image metadata and optimizing images helps boost rankings for local searches.

Before we move further into the tips and tricks of using image metadata to boost your local SEO, remember that your primary focus should be on selecting high-quality pictures.

Your website or images may appear on the front page of results from search engines due to your amazing technical prowess, but if the pictures themselves don't look appealing or useful, then it's a waste of time.

So how can you ensure that search engines discover and display your clear, captivating images in accordance with your brand or content?

These tips are simple to implement and could have a major effect on how your photos appear online.

File Size

Be mindful of the dimensions of your image file when uploading them onto a website. This takes up user time and also sends a negative signal to Google, which considers site loading speed an important ranking factor.

Making the image suitable for your website requires making informed decisions before uploading it rather than altering it after the upload.

Avoid uploading a large image and then forcing viewers to view it at a lower resolution using HTML width or height attributes.

When optimizing images, it is essential to maximize their dimension as large as possible while making the storage space as small as possible.

This can be achieved through compression of the image - this reduces its size when digital information is removed while still ensuring high-quality visuals.

Image File Name

Providing a descriptive and straightforward name for your image is an essential step in optimizing it for the web.

This gives search engines the first chance to understand that this image is associated with a particular area, product, or service.

Separate the words in a title with a hyphen, such as this: immigration-lawyer-toronto.jpg

Alt Text

Search engines are improving their technology every year, but they still struggle with recognizing images and understanding their content.

Incorporating alternative text (also referred to as "alt text") within an image could help explain both its content and what it depicts.

Adding keywords as well as local modifiers in the alt-text of an image will help search engines better comprehend its significance and relevance.

But don't over-optimize. Doing so could cause more harm than good in terms of rankings in search engines.

Additionally, it could create an unsatisfactory user experience for visually impaired individuals who use screen readers to explain the elements of a web page.

Encase the Image with Relevant Text

Viewing the HTML code of a webpage provides insight into how keywords relate to an image.

By surrounding an image with words that contain relevant keywords, search engines are better able to connect it with its textual counterpart.

Anchor Text

Anchor text refers to hyperlinks pointing at an image, that is, the website page representing the media file in the image.

By creating hyperlinks for the image and including anchor text with locally relevant keywords, then this page for the image is more likely to be ranked for those keywords.

Geotagging

Geotagging your Image with Latitude and Longitude coordinates in meta-data is the most accurate way to assign it an address.

This can be accomplished using various SEO tools.

Citing In Metadata

GeoSetter allows you to add additional metadata information to images, such as keywords, URLs, and NAP (Business Name Address, Phone, and Name).

With NAP information attached to an image, it's possible for it to be referenced on any website wishing to post it - helping boost local rankings!

Sitemap

By providing Google with a Sitemap, you're helping them discover every corner of your website.

It is even possible to include images in the Sitemap so that any images uploaded to it are properly identified and indexed.

This step helps ensure all elements on your site are easily indexed by search engine bots.

Conclusion

Following these rules will ensure your optimized images appear on any website, in Google/Bing/Yahoo/Google listings or directory listings, uploaded to photo-sharing websites or other image-sharing platforms, etc.

Digital files containing local information help inform web crawlers that this image and its contents should appear in local searches.

Image enhancement can be a time-consuming task, particularly if your website contains many images.