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What are the best off-page SEO techniques to rank images higher in Google search?
Hello there! I have an image blog and there are 5 to 6 images in each post. I have applied all the on-page techniques like using “Alt text”, Image name, caption, etc. After publishing, I share my images on image sharing sites like Pinterest, Instagram, etc. Now, could anyone please suggest what are the other best off-page techniques to rank images higher on Google image search? Any help would be appreciable!
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1 Reply
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Ok, going to give you some advice that I usually only give to paying clients so if you’re smart you will listen carefully.
1. Build links that point both to the page the images are on and to the actual images themselves.
2. Make sure your images appear to be completely unique to Google by going to [images.google.com](https://images.google.com) and dragging/dropping them into the search field and look at the description (“possible related searches”) and other images and pages that come up in the SERP. What is returned after searching should be only images or pages from your website or your images posted to other sites like Pinterest.
3. You can use [images.google.com](https://images.google.com) to test every image on your website to ensure Google is indexing the images correctly. What I mean is, the content of each of your images should come up as the description of the image in searches on [images.google.com](https://images.google.com). For instance, if you have an image of a couple walking a white dog in a park Google should be able to determine that from the content in your image.
4. If Google doesn’t return the subject matter of your image correctly then you will most likely need to work with editing the image and subsequently keep submitting the image to Google until Google is correctly able to tell what the image content is (in this case the couple walking the white dog).
5. If you are stuck trying to get Google Images to correctly recognize an image’s subject matter just do a normal Google search for the activity in the image and look at the images that Google normally returns for that particular search (for instance, ‘couple walking in park with white dog’). You may then need to alter your image a bit to format it similar to the images that do come up for the term or replace your image altogether.Now, it is true that Google can determine image content from surrounding content on the page but that can take time for Google to work out. It’s better to take steps in the beginning to make sure your content is as ‘Google friendly’ as possible.
Ideally, you should try to get images from your website to come in searches, not images on parasites like Pinterest. You want to own the content and funnel traffic to your site, not Pinterest’s site. How do you do that?
1. For every image you have, crop the image, making it smaller, and use that new, smaller image as the image you post to pinterest and other like sites. Be sure on every image you post to a site like Pinterest that you include a link to the full sized, uncropped image on your website.
2. Lastly, always watermark your sites. Doesn’t really help with SEO but it will save you some headache down the line when you have to deal with sites that have stolen your content. Download a DMCA template to have handy for submitting to hosting companies and registrars for removing your unauthorized content.
