How To Create an Image Sitemap on WordPress
Have you listened to this, An image says a thousand words, right? Image SEO is an important part of any kind of blogging site, it helps you get traffic through ranked images. But how to do Image SEO?
It’s 2023 and if still you did not submit your image sitemap to webmasters, you are already late. A search engine will only be able to rank your images if you submit them in a proper way.
What is the proper way to submit images to search engines to rank on top? The answer is, to submit an image sitemap of your WordPress site to the webmaster.
Most of us submit a sitemap of our website to the webmaster excluding an image sitemap. The best practice to submit a sitemap is to include an image sitemap as well.
This article or guide will help you in submitting an image sitemap with the help of an image sitemap generator. We will learn step-by-step each process with the help of images and practical examples.
What You Will Get From This Lesson:
- What is Image SEO
- How to Create an Image Sitemap on WordPress
- How to Submit an Image Sitemap to Google Webmaster
- Benefits of Submitting an Image Sitemap
What is Image SEO?
In simple words, an image SEO is to optimize your images in a good way so that these images can rank on search engines and get you traffic, isn’t it what we all want?
Now you must be wondering what exactly is image optimization.
Image Optimization Includes Following Key Points:
- Image File Name
- Image File Format
- Image Size
- Image Alt Text
- Image Surrounding Text
- Image Details
- Image Caption
- Image Sitemap
If you check an image with all the above parameters, your image will be called an optimized image, and this process of optimization of an image is called image SEO.
How to Create an Image Sitemap on WordPress
Sitemaps help search engines better understand your website’s data and structure. A sitemap also helps you in indexing on different search engines.
What is an Image Sitemap?
An image sitemap holds all the information about your site’s images i.e. title, caption, and image location. An image sitemap creates a list of all images available on your site, which help search engine easily index and rank them.
An image sitemap can also resolve your low-traffic issue as well, as many people face the issue of low traffic and ask why is my blog not getting enough traffic. Your ranked images give you a handsome amount of traffic through Google.
Let’s learn step-by-step how you can create an image sitemap in WordPress.
Step 1:
An image sitemap can be added in two ways, through a plugin or by manually creating an XML file. But when it comes to WordPress we usually use plugins.
So, for an image sitemap, you will need an image sitemap generator. Go on Google, and search for this term Google XML Sitemap For Images Plugin WordPress.
You can easily download this plugin for free and upload it to your WordPress dashboard.
Step 2:
When it’s uploaded now you need o activate it and go to the plugins section in your WordPress dashboard. In the plugins, you will go to this new plugin named “XML Sitemap for Images” and click on the “settings page” as shown in the image.
Step 3:
When you click on the settings page, you will land on this page shown in the picture below. Here you have to click on the “Generate Image Sitemap” button.
Step 4:
Your image sitemap is created on WordPress and now you can easily submit it to Google’s webmaster by adding it to your robots.txt file.
How to Submit an Image Sitemap to Google Webmaster
Once you have created your image sitemap on WordPress with the help of the image sitemap generator plugin. Now you have to add this sitemap to your robots.txt file so that it can be easy for the webmaster to index and understand all the present images on your site.
The process is quite simple, all you need is the Yoast SEO plugin. If you have already installed the Yoast SEO plugin then it will just take a minute to edit the robots.txt file, otherwise, you can easily install it from WordPress it’s free for everyone.
Step 1:
Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the Yoast plugin, and go to the tool. When you click on the tool button you will land on the below page.
On this page click on the File Editor to edit this file.
Step 2:
When you click on the File Editor you will be landed on the below page. Here you have to paste the image sitemap in the robots.txt file that you have generated from the image sitemap generator plugin.
After paying for the image sitemap, click the save changes button.
That’s it, you are done! Thanks, me in the comments section!
Benefits of Submitting an Image Sitemap
There are a lot of benefits to submitting an image sitemap to any webmaster.
- It helps search engines better understand your images.
- It helps index your images quickly.
- It will help you rank your images because a well-optimized image is more likely to rank other than an image with no optimization.
- An image sitemap can get you more traffic, according to a study around 22% of traffic on Google comes from images.
- An image sitemap increases the chances of your visibility on search engines.
What is the conclusion of submitting an Image Sitemap?
If you have read the whole article, we hope the answer is clear in your mind. Further, it is a good practice and will help your blog get traffic.
Google and any other search engine recommend that content writers add images to their content for a better explanation of your content. An image example can easily help readers to understand the process and meaning of the content.
An image with the right surroundings has a more chance to rank, than an image with irrelevant surroundings. So try to add images where you are talking about them.
We hope this content will help you in the future. Share your thoughts in the comments section and share the content with your friends to help more people. For more such help full content visit our home page, and you can also contact us through the contact us page in the footer section.