As we all know, SEO is the latest technique to optimize the website and content. It helps to make the product, services visible, and rank higher for the targeted audience. While doing optimizing, you should consider every single detail that can help to enhance the overall performance and rating. Optimizing the images is another important and simple thing that can make a site more competitive.

Users usually think that SEO is related to the content management and placement of the keywords to be on top of the google rank. But on another side, content can be anything like written content or images as well. Images can improve the overall web page experience for the viewers.

Tips To Optimize Your Images For SEO

For every image or photo, you use or add on your site, make sure to consider these following tips to optimize them for the search engines.

1. Choose The Right Quality

Quality image is an essential factor for optimization. While choosing the image, you must select a file that looks good and complimented with the content. Bad image with poor quality looks inappropriate and affect the blog or content quality.

2. Image File Format

Images are available with different file formats, including JPG, PNG, and GIF. Google images support JPEG, GIF, PNG, WebP, BMP, and SVG file formats. For good optimization, it is vital to understand the difference between each type and where to use them. PNG image file is considered a high-quality image that is helpful for high-quality optimization.

As compared to PNG, JPG is a low-quality format file and not always support search results. Similarly, GIF only supports small images with plain backgrounds.

3. Add An Image Filename

Before uploading the image at your site, it is necessary to add a proper file name. Naming the file will not only specify the image but also keep it relevant to a particular keyword. Usually, when people browse or search something through keywords, they did not focus on the file name. But it helps the search engine and its algorithm to show particular images against the keyword search.

Avoid using generic filenames like "pic.gif", "image1.jpg", "1.jpg" when possible — if your site has thousands of images you might consider automating the naming of the images. The image file name helps in the optimization.

4. Add Image On-Site

It is essential to consider all aspects of optimization that brought the traffic directly to the website. And so, for image optimization, upload the corresponding image on the webpage first with adequately linked with the content. If viewers click for the particular images, it will bring them directly to the web site, and that increases traffic.

5. Go Through Social Media

Social media play an essential role in SEO and increases customer engagement. You have to optimize and share the images with social sites. That allows viewers to link and share the image with other sites. It helps to engage the audience and traffic directly to the website.

6. Choose Your Image Hosting

Sometimes people choose separate hosting sites to upload images for optimization and to save disk space as well. Avoid using any third party website for image hosting. It can damage the image or fail to upload. Also, it can be blocked and removed with a high traffic ratio. In the case of unavailable images, the efforts to optimize will fail.

7. Reduce Your Image File Size

Make sure to compress the scaled image, so it serves in the smallest file size possible. Reduce the file size as much as possible, without affecting too much the image quality. There are several ways out there to optimize your images. You can try some easy to use tools like TinyPNG, Compress JPEG, jpeg.io, ImageOptim, or Kraken.io. Upload your image, and the tool will take care of compressing the images.

When you have optimized your images, test your site with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, StresStimulus, DareBoost, Lighthouse, or Chrome DevTools

8. Use Responsive Images

Most users are searching in search engines using a mobile device. Designing responsive web pages leads to better UX (user experience) since users use them across an excessive amount of device types, images should have the srcset attribute which allows specifying different versions of the same image — specifically for different screen sizes.

Example:

9. Add Alt Text

The alt text("alternative text") or alt tag is added to an image to specify a descriptive text in place if the image can't be displayed to the visitor for some reason. It highlights the identity of an image when you hover over it with your mouse cursor. Also, alt text provides information about the picture when using a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader.

Be sure to add alt text to every image you use, briefly describe what is in the picture so both visitor and search engines can make sense of it.

Avoid long alt text, it can be considered spammy. Avoid filling alt attributes with keyword stuffing, or copying and pasting entire sentences as it results in negative user experience and may cause your website to be seen as spam by search engines.

10. Add Images To Your XML Sitemaps

Google encourages site owners to use image sitemaps to give their search engine more information about the images available on your website. Be sure to use image sitemaps for better image SEO, adding images to your XML sitemaps helps Google index your images, increase the likelihood that your images can be found in Image Search results.

11. Use HTML Images

Make sure to use HTML image elements to embed images in your content. Example: img or pictures elements. You can use the lazy loading attribute on images to make your page load faster for your users. Avoid using CSS to display images that you want search engines to index. Google parses the markup of your pages to index images but does not index CSS images. Example :

Final Consideration!

Search engine optimization is the modern and latest way to market the product or services among the high traffic target market. It will give a chance to not only introduce the offering at a considerable level but also make a website to get the highest rank in search engine results by adopting the right strategy.

Google is getting better every day at recognizing elements in images, makes sure that the pictures or photos you add to your site contribute to a good SEO(search engine optimization) and UX(user experience).

Image optimization is one of the best processes in overall website SEO and can significantly contribute to increasing your conversion. Consider these tips in mind when adding an image to your products, blog posts, articles, or any type of content.