How To Use The Images On Your Website To Get Backlinks
Most site owners are so focused on using guest posting and creating great content to gain backlinks that they overlook one of the most effective ways to get backlinks: Image link building.
Image link building is the process of creating high-quality and useful images that people want to use in their content and earning backlinks from them.
When people use the images on your website and reference your site as the source, you gain a backlink in your niche.
In this article, we will be looking at how you can use images to gain backlinks and the types of images that can enable you to achieve that. Let’s get right into it.
How To Use Your Website Images To Get Backlinks
• Create High-quality and Useful Images
The first step to getting backlinks from the images on your website is to ensure that the images are of high-quality and useful. People won’t download or use an image that has low picture quality or isn’t properly designed.
Next, you need to ensure that the images are relevant and useful to your target audience.
This works hand in hand with keyword research. When you write content on in-demand and relevant keywords and create great images on them, the images will automatically be in demand and relevant as well.
• Maintain The Right Dimensions
Creating high-quality and relevant images is good, but if they break or do not look good on other sites, they will be ignored for other images.
So, you need to ensure that your images have a maximum width of 1200px, and if they are vertical, they should be less than 5000px tall.
Make sure that your fonts are also readable in small sizes because if the labels on the images are not visible when they are embedded on other sites, they won’t be used.
In addition to that, ensure your images are well-compressed so that they won’t affect your page’s loading speed or that of any other site that uses them.
• Include a Link back to Your Website
There are several ways of doing this. You can choose to simply include a return link to your website and leave it at that.
Or you can include a small watermark on the image with either your brand’s name, logo, or your site’s URL written somewhere strategic on the image, for protection and brand recognition. Just in case the person who uses the image fails to link it back to your site.
Alternatively, you can add an embed code below your image that anyone can copy and paste on their site to give you a backlink.
• Ask Those You Use Your Images To Link Back to Your Website
From time to time, you can go to Google and check whether any blog or website has used any of your images.
If you find the sites that have used them, you can go ahead and check if they added your website’s link to show that you are the source from which they got the image.
If they didn’t add a link back to your site, you can send an email to the blog editor and ask them to add a link that references your site as the image’s source. This is a great way to get backlinks.
Types Of Images That You Can Use to Get Backlinks
• Topic Images and Designs
A lot of bloggers and digital publishers do not pay attention to creating images for the topics they write about. They just write content and go to the “Images” section of the keyword and look for the image that best fits that topic, download it, add it to their content, and reference it with a link.
So, ensure the images you are creating for a keyword describe it in the best way possible. It could be either descriptive images or images with write-ups. Just ensure they describe what the keyword or topic is about.
For example, if you are creating an image for a keyword like “How to use images to gain backlinks”, you can either create an image with the exact text or use illustrations that describe it, just like the one we used in this article.
• Infographics and Graphs
Bloggers and website owners love using infographics and graphs in their content because it serves as a visual representation of data and instructions. These visuals make information easy to understand and retain, so a lot of brands love using them.
You can create these images based on relevant topics or statistics in your niche and share them online. When site owners and publishers see that these visuals are relevant to the topics they are writing about, they will use them and reference your site as the source, hence giving you an extra backlink.
• Product Images
High-quality product images are definitely a great way of gaining backlinks. From review blogs to other e-commerce stores, several sites need clear pictures of products to make their content more appealing.
So, when you take clean pictures of in-demand products and post them online, they will most likely be used by other sites and linked back to your site as the source.
Final Thoughts
Image link building is a great way of building your site’s backlink profile. So, when uploading images to your website, ensure you use an alt tag to describe the image, image captions to include your keyword, appropriate text that tells what is in the image, and a link back to your site.
These factors will help improve the search rankings of your images, making it easier to find and increasing the probability of your site gaining a backlink from them.