All You Need About Image Link Building
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Introduction
Attractive and informative images have always been an essential part of link building strategies. Search engines and audiences find these assets very useful to improve the overall experience.
There are two ways to earn image links, just like other types of links – Naturally and Outreach. Creating your own images with the right label and reaching out to the right audience is highly valuable.
If you have little to no idea about image link building, we will help you. We have created this guide to help you get a basic idea on:
- What is Image Link Building?
- The Different Types
- What Images Should You Produce?
- Audit Images that Build Links
- Automate Image Link Building
- How to Rank the Images?
What is Image Link Building
Before we move on to the various types of image link building, lets first know what the technique is all about.
Image link building is similar to mention link building. In this case, you are looking for instances where you can link images related to your brand or website. You can either create image links naturally or by outreach.
Image Link Building Types
Let’s move on to the most important part of this guide – Different Types of Image Link building.
Infographics
Though the importance of infographics has diluted over the last few years, they still are one of the best content and link building strategies for many SEO experts.
Infographics can be used in various ways, but first, let us know how to make one because that is something that most people stumble upon.
Topic
This is the most overlooked parts of the creation of an infographic. The first step of creating the infographic is choosing a topic. Find a subject that your audience will be interested in. Other than this, also check if your competitors already have an infographic of the same idea as yours.
Rough Outline
After you have selected the topic, take some time out and research. Creating a rough outline will be helpful in making information fall into the right place. We would suggest you, to begin with, the general information and the move to the minute details.
Design
Before you start with the final design, research, and visualize the design, you would want. Understand if the design will be able to take up the information and represent every point correctly.
Ensure to use every detail wisely while breaking texts and telling the story. Also, remember to follow your branding assets and include your company’s details at the bottom of the infographic for references.
Submitting and Promoting
We suggest you embed code below the infographic with the help of the code generator such as siegemedia to let other websites credit your rightly when using the infographic.
Promote the infographic at every single website where you can. This is the only thing that will help you get natural links and should not be ignored. You need to let people know about this infographic that you have created.
Guest Infographic
This method is similar to guest posting. Unlike guest posting, you already have a resource to offer to the sites. Some will repost the infographic while some will ask for an original one with the article written on the subject. It all depends on the website.
Pinterest is a popular website that accepts guest infographics. You can also use this platform to the optimal by looking for other websites which have accepted infographics by your competitors.
Follow the detailed procedure below:
- Know the main theme of your infographic
- Look for infographics with the same keyword
- Choose from the results and carry out an image back search to check if other websites have used the infographic other than the original website
- List the websites, and it’s contact details
- Reach out to them by putting up the infographic you have created
Reverse Image Search
Sometimes some webmasters love the infographic and publish it on their website giving the complete credits while some forget to link back to you while posting. This is common with images.
One of the best ways to get a natural link is to reach out to those site owners and request them to link the infographic to your site. Following these steps will help you.
- Find the URL of the original image that you have posted on your website. You can find this by right-clicking the selected image and select ‘copy image location
- Go to Google Image Search and click on the little camera as you can see below. This allows you to search the image
- Paste the URL of the image you copied and click on the camera
- Google will list down all the results of the pages using the same URL
- You can also drag the image to Google Image Searchbar
After you have found the results, visit each website and check if all have given back a link to your website. If not, find out their contact details and request them to give you a link that you deserve.
Google Image Search and TinEye are the tools that will help you find if others are using your images. Just upload your image on any of the tools above, and you will then find results where the same or similar image is being used. We recommend you to use both the tools because the searches may be different.
Social Media
Social media is one of the best platforms to promote any type of content like videos, images, and web pages. Just like it is important to be visible on Google, it is also essential to be visible on social media.
It is wise to spread a word on social media because millions of people are on it. It is proved that people like to look at images and videos rather than reading write-ups on social media. This is why image link building is very effective.
Social media does not count as SEO, but it can influence people to look for your brand pages and get you more traffic and thus potential leads.
Image Bookmarking
There are plenty of image bookmarking (social bookmarking) websites that you can use to promote linkable images. This method helps you build links to your site. Here are some websites you can use for image bookmarking:
Memes
This might not be a productive strategy for many, but memes have become a marketable way to help pages go viral. You can create and edit the memes on various tools like Photoshop as well as Meme Generator.
Market your memes through social media, which will help you reach the target audience. It helps you generate links through sharing, image hosting, and reposting. Thus, it will build links for your websites, generate more traffic, and increase visibility.
What Images Should You Create?
It is important to produce the right images for a successful image link building campaign. Make sure of two things:
Relevance – Images are going to be used in your website context
Demand – People want your images and thus use them
Relevance
This is under your control. You can manage the images you release through your website. If you are a local business in Jersey City, then being featured on the New Jersey websites and pages are known as relevancy. By this, you will be sure of the context of the content being released.
Demand
You cannot find out how many people search for particular images. There are tools that can help you get an idea.
Google Trends
Google Trends helps you segment search volume by search kind.
You will get several options when you filter the images.
You can consider many other options for the same as:
- Shutterstock related searches
- Search Console
- Flickr Stats
Audit Images That Build Links
If you think you do not have any image ideas for link building, then don’t worry because every business does. Many times, your images are being used by someone, and you don’t even know. This is known as Link Harvesting. You already have the assets online to create new links.
Below are the image assets that you may already have on the web other than infographics:
- Logos – you can find those who are using your old logo and request them to replace with the new one.
- Brand Mascots
- Employee Photos
- Product Pictures
- Awards
Automate Image Link Building
You can use the tools like TinEye and Google Image Search, as mentioned above in Reverse Image Search. But checking if someone has used your images every now and then is difficult. You can even automate this process.
You can use the tool – Solar Winds. All you need to do is:
- Add all the images to Solar Winds
- Set the frequency on how often you would want to check
- Get emails of the new occurrences
- Email the prospects asking them to link
This will help you not miss out on any websites that may use your images without linking back to you.
How to Rank the Images?
This is basically Image SEO that you need to follow to ensure your images are seen on Google.
- Save the images with the relevant filename
- Create a description with relevant keyword
- Include a keyword in the title of the album
- Upload images
- Make sure every image has a unique and relevant name
- Write a request with the description for users who use your image to give relevant credits
- Use tags
This video can help you learn in detail:
We hope to have helped you make understand the basic Image Link Building. If you have any doubts, you can leave us a comment below.
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