Use of illustrations in blog posts is quite common, and almost all of us use them every now and then to make the posts more sticky and readable. If we are using images in our posts, we must also know how to make them SEO friendly to get extra traffic from search engines. If optimized correctly, we can get very good traffic through 'Google Image Search'. To clearly understand this optimization process, lets take the example of an image shown below.
Image Credit: majortk
1. Naming Files Correctly
Choosing a file name that correctly describes the context of the image makes it easy for the indexing bots to categorize it in a better way. Wrong way to name the above image is IMG02056.jpg.
How about ball.jpg?
Hey, that's obvious buddy.
What if we name it blue-ball?
That's better.
And how about plastic-blue-ball?
Hah, that's excellent...
2. Descriptive Tag
Let's take a look at the HTML code, that we use in embedding the images in blog posts.
Note the descriptive alt tag, that will help in better categorization of the image while indexing will be done by various search engine bots. This will increase the chances of this image being shown in relevant image search.
Wrapping Contextual Text Around The Image
Make sure you embed the image right in the middle of the related content, with relevant titles and descriptive text. This will further help the bots to better categorize and index the image.
Smart Anchor Text
Linking out to resources and information is an essential ingredient of any blog post. Whether we are linking to any external blog/website or doing cross-linking (internal linking) of posts, choosing a proper anchor text increases the relevance of the content to which it is referring. Proper anchor text helps in achieving better ranking in SERP's and is one of the most important part of on-page optimization process. Here is an example that shows proper implementation of anchor texts.
First take a look at this example with poor anchor text as well as redundant text.