Back to: How to Increase News Website Traffic
It is no secret that image SEO relies on how your image is and what text you add to them. Images and infographics can bring up to 30% traffic to a news website if they are properly used. So, in this lesson, I will try to explain how we can use images and infographics for bringing traffic to our news website.
Contents
Images
We all know that a picture speaks a thousand words. So, if we add relevant images to our articles, they will not only increase engagement but also rank in Google and Bing. In addition, they will serve as featured images when someone shares the link to social media or any platform which supports open graph.
But, I have often seen that bloggers do not make the image good enough to speak a thousand words. e.g. often you would have noticed that blogs have images that have been directly downloaded from PixaBay or Pexels. Here is an example:
As we can see, this featured image seems to have been downloaded from a free stock website. Even if this image appears/ranks in Google, no one will click it because it does not have any relevant information which may appear useful to the user.
On the other hand, I have also seen images with too much content on them. Moreover, some bloggers don’t even bother to add information to the Alt Text, Image Title, Description, etc.
Let us understand how we can optimize our images for the best performance in SERPs as well as in articles.
Adding Information to the Image
The first step is to edit an image and add relevant information to it. As you can see, in the screenshot above, this news agency has edited the image to show its name (The Wire), Title (with focus keywords), and a small excerpt.
It does not involve any advanced editing skills. You can use Canva to make some images. This way our images will act as standalone articles with information that will make the user click on them.
We can also add our website name/brand name to boost our brand. Imagine, if the image is shared across social media, the site will get free promotion.
Finding Keywords for our Image
The next step is to find relevant keywords for our image alt text, title, and description. You can use our Unlimited Keywords Generator Tool to find relevant keywords for our images.
Insert a seed keyword (e.g. COVID in India) and hit “Generate”. The tool will extract all the keywords relating to our topic. Copy the relevant keywords and group them as per the images which you will use on your site. You can also group them into two categories- Keywords for Alt Text and Title and Keywords for description.
Adding Keywords to Images
The final step is to add those keywords to the Image Alt text Section, Title section, and description section. For Alt text and Title, you can use the same keyword. For description, you can write a small excerpt with 1-2 keywords.
As you can see, this is the same process that we follow while meta of our articles. So, take image SEO just like that of our articles.
Another important thing worth remembering is to add a title to the image before uploading it to your website. That title should be relevant to the image and of course with a proper keyword.
Infographics
Infographics are very powerful tools for branding and traffic. Usually they are of the size 800×2000. The benefit of using infographics is that they have ample height. Hence we can add information, icons, and a number of images to describe an event, a tutorial, features of something etc
We can add our website name to it. As compared to regular images, infographics have far more chances of getting downloads and shares. e.g. if a user find an infographic on COVID-19 (How to remain safe from getting infected), he will definitely download it and share with friends.
If we have added our site name on the infographic, the readers will do open the site to find more infographics. We can even make a separate category in which we can have just infographics describing events, instructions, tutorials, etc
As far as SEO of infographics is concerned, it is exactly like that of our images. So, try adding images and infographics to your articles and eventually you will see a significant change in your traffic!
