Most Real Estate Professionals take a lot of time and spend a lot of money optimizing their website for SEO.  But there are surprisingly few who take the time to optimize their Real Estate Photography for SEO.  Image optimizing is a simple task, and can bring your sites thousands of extra visitors!  Simply follow these easy tips:

1. Use Spectacular Photos: The more beautiful the photo, the more likely it is to go viral. Especially on popular sites like Pinterest. At Obeo, we’ve seen a huge increase in orders for Twilight and HDR photos. Both these techniques create the spectacular results consumers love, share, and remember!
2. Use web-sized Images: Now you don’t want to go too small, but the search engines will give priority to images with fast page load times. So, if you’re an Obeo client, simply download and use the web-sized photos from our photo gallery (I recommend Web Medium for blogging). If you need to re-size high resolution images, try using the amazing Windows Image Resizer!
3. Rename the image file using keywords/phrases: The search engines don’t have eyes to see your photo, so they index the file name.  When you upload your new listing photos, why not use the property address in the file name.  Or the neighborhood name?  You could name the front photo “beautiful Signal Creek golf course home”.  And the kitchen photo could be “1234 Main Street Denver designer kitchen”.
4. Tag your Images: Each image should, whenever and where ever possible, be tagged with appropriate keywords and phrases. You can do this easily on sites like Flickr!
5. Create keyword rich ALT tags: When adding an image to your website or blog, you are given the option of adding an ALT tag.  Many people quickly skip this text, and are losing out on some great SEO.    ALT tags were originally created so that visually impaired readers using a screen reader would have a description of the image. However the search engines quickly started to index the ALT tags as a description of the image, and it is now an important part of your SEO.
6. Give your Image a Keyword rich Title: The title of the image is also indexed by the search engines. So when adding an image to your blog, website, Facebook, or anywhere else, always give it a keyword rich title.
7. Try watermarking your images: I recently had a fun conversation with my friend Kristal Kraft.  She is a Realtor (in Denver) and an amazing photographer. She uploads gorgeous photos to Facebook and Google + and they often go viral and are shared and viewed by 1,000s of consumers.  Artistically, Kristal dislikes having a watermark on her image, but she agreed to give it a try and see what happens. So now she is adding a watermark of her website to each image.  It will be interesting to see if her website traffic spikes! Check out one of Kristal’s photos below.

Follow these simple steps and not only will you be engaging readers and followers with your gorgeous photos, but you’ll be attracting a lot more traffic to your site through your enhanced SEO!

See You There

 Join Obeo on Facebook & Twitter, for Fan & Follower only special promotions!