Optimize Images for SEO
Optimizing images for SEO is a must on the road to positioning a web page. Hundreds of articles have already been written on this subject. But every day, the companies that work on organic positioning find that the reality is that the deserved attention is not paid to the indexing of images. Consequently, the positioning of a page is never as good as it could be.
We all know that text is critical when we want to achieve organic growth in search engines. It is one of the fundamental keys to SEO growth. There are many ways to make your text pleasing to the eye, and thanks to that, achieve more visits: cuts in the paragraphs, creative lists or narrations, etc., but one of the best ways to do it is by using images that accompany your articles and make it more enjoyable.
The use of images is also essential when you are creating or promoting your online store. As the saying goes, “what is not shown is not sold”. Either in a blog or an online store, the images accompany our publication, but they can and should be optimized to contribute to the web positioning in search engines.
In this commentary, we will give you five tips that we consider key when positioning your images on the web :
Table of Contents
1.Use Clear and Descriptive File Names:
Try to give your images easy file names so that Google can read them and pull out information. Imagine that Google or any other search engine, comes across a painting titled “Image01.jpeg”. In this case, the search engine will not understand what the vision refers to just before. Instead, by naming the image file with a longer and more comprehensive title related to the image displays, such as “Optimize-Image-SEO.jpeg,” you provide more clues to Google to understand its content, the image and the site where it is located.
Be careful not to commit bad practices, writing excessively long or keyword-saturated file names.
2.Use keywords in the Title and the Alt Attribute.
When you see an image of a crying baby, you instantly recognize what is happening in the picture. The problem is that this instant recognition is not possible for search engines right now. Instead, you need to help them understand each of their photos with alternate text.
The “title” is the title of the image, worth the redundancy. It must be descriptive and contain the primary keyword to which the picture refers, at least. Indeed, this title matches the name of the file that we have already optimized, but we will write it using a standard “SEO image optimization” script this time.
The “alt attribute” refers to an alternative text that allows the browser to understand better what the image is around. Add information to the file name and “title”. Additionally, it is helpful for images when a web browser cannot process them properly. How many times have you opened an email on the desktop or your mobile device, and the picture was not loading correctly? How many times have you clicked just because you’ve read what the view was approximate? As pushers, we want to write descriptive keyword-rich alt text to increase click-through-rate even if our ideas cannot be displayed correctly by our users.
If you decide to use an image as a link, be sure to include alternate text relevant to the link’s destination to enhance the user experience.
3.Be Careful with the Size of the Image:
As we know, Google places great importance on the speed of the site. That is the reason why image compression is significant on any page. It does not matter how many photos your blog, corporate website, or online store has. You should always compress and optimize them for the web.
Optimizing images for SEO is almost mandatory. It ensures that they do not hinder the loading time. It is essential to make the image file size as small as possible (without sacrificing quality, of course).
With free tools like “Compressor.io”, “Imageoptim”, or other image optimizers at your disposal, there is no excuse. Don’t let your browser resize a large image to make it look smaller. Do it yourself and make sure the image is around 60-90 KB (60,000-90,000 bytes). This data is not exact, and it is only an approximation. There will be images that require more kilobytes than others for the information they contain.
The Size you should surely use images of very different proportions, but the most common for a photo in a blog article would be about 640 pixels wide. Remember also that you work with a screen resolution of 72 dpi (dots per inch) on the internet.
To solve it, always use an image editing program to achieve the desired Size. If you are an Adobe Photoshop user, please use its full potential when preparing images for the web.
4.Use Commonly Accepted Formats:
It is highly recommended to use JPEG as a first option and PNG only as a second option if you need an image with transparency, for example.
5.Supply a File for Images on Your Sitemap:
Consider grouping your images in a single directory rather than having image files spread across multiple directories and subdirectories across your domain. An image file would simplify the path to ideas for search engines. Also, this helps webmasters to have their workspace organized.
Nowadays, we’ve covered the essentials of how image files can be optimized for SEO, and it’s important to remember that user experience should always come first. Good visuals are a great way to build traffic to your site. However, users must instead find you in search engines.
By following these practices, you will increase the likelihood that your images will appear in relevant search results. Now you know how to optimize images for SEO!