When it comes to SEO, we often think of optimizing our website content and keywords. But what about images? As images are an important part of any website or blog post, they are a great way to ensure content engagement and boost your SEO.
By optimizing your images for search engines, you can reach a wider audience and get more traffic to your site. Hence, optimizing images must be an integral aspect of your overall SEO strategy if you want to take full advantage of SEO.
That’s why we share some important image SEO strategies that you can use to boost content engagement and get more people to your site. From choosing the right file format to using keywords, read on for some tips on optimizing your images for SEO as part of your SEO service plan.
Why should you optimize your images?
Now that you know how to optimize images on your website, let’s try to understand why you must do it.
It boosts the website’s speed.
Images constitute the size of the website considerably. Hence, adding more images without optimizing them can make your website unnecessarily slow. This can compromise user experience and increase the bounce rate.
But optimizing images can address these concerns and improve your website’s overall search performance and user engagement.
It helps bring more traffic.
Although many are not aware, image search is a commonly used faculty of Google, and it can really drive traffic to your website. For this to happen, the images must be optimized with the right keywords.
It makes your website more accessible.
In today’s world where accessibility is often an important aspect that every business must take care of, optimizing images with the right titles and tags can help you with that.
This will directly impact the traffic to your website for sure.
How to optimize images for SEO?
In order to ensure that your images are optimized for search engines, there are a few key things to keep in mind.
1. Create keyword-rich file names and alt tags for images and use images relevant to the topic of your article or website.
2. Avoid using large file sizes, as this will slow down your page-loading speed.
3. Always host your images and related resources on reliable, high-speed servers.
Let’s take a look at each of them in detail.
Images file names
One of the most important aspects of image SEO is the file name. The name must describe the image and make sense to everyone looking at it, including the search engine bots.
The file name can be up to 100 characters long. Image tags are the text that appears when you hover over an image.
Image alt text
Image alt text is one of the most important on-page SEO factors for images. It is used to describe an image so that search engines can understand what it is about.
Alt text should be used on all images, but especially on those that are decorative or used as links.
The text should be relevant to the image and include keywords you want to rank for. For example, if you have an image of a cat, your alt text might be “cat playing with a toy.”
Some common mistakes people make with alt text include using keywords that are irrelevant to the image or using the same keyword repeatedly. This can actually hurt your SEO rather than help it.
When done correctly, image alt text can help improve your content’s engagement and overall ranking in search engines.
Choose the right image format.
Before you start, understand that there is no right or wrong format. However, it depends on the person using it and how they want to use it.
The following are the most common formats and when you can use them:
JPEG
It is the most popular and commonly used image format worldwide for most of the images on the web. JPEG is a preferred format because it can be compressed to any size the user wants.
WebP
An advanced format for images, WebP is preferred when the user wants to compress the image or animations to even greater lengths than a JPEG or PNG format. It also does not compromise on the animation frames, depth of color, etc.
PNG
PNG is Often used by users when they need to make a transparent background in the image.
SVG
This format is often used with icons or logos.
Create an image sitemap.
You may be familiar with creating XML sitemaps for SEO. Similarly, you can also create an image sitemap to help search engine bots crawl the images easily and index them.
Like an XML site, an image sitemap includes URLs to the images on the website.
If you want to create one, here are the guidelines by Google.
Resize images to fit their intended location on the page.
Use a content delivery network (CDN).
One of the best ways to improve the image SEO of your website is to use a CDN. A CDN is a network of servers located at different locations to distribute images and online resources more quickly.
There are many content delivery networks that you can use, such as
- Amazon CloudFront
- Cloudflare
- Stackpath
- CacheFly
- Verizon Media
- CDN77.com
Add structured data.
Optimizing your image with structured data is another way to improve your image SEO. Like alt text, it also provides the search engine bot with additional information about the image.
This can be extremely value-adding for businesses in the eCommerce industry as an image is a primary tool that users depend on to make decisions.
With the right structured data, search engines can return the image for better visual search results.
Make your images mobile friendly.
As mobile search has become a huge source of high-quality website traffic, optimizing your images for mobile phones and other hand-held devices is a huge part.
There are clear guidelines about optimizing your image for mobile phones by Google.
While it could be useful to read the entire guide, the idea is to make the image responsive.
Following these tips will help ensure that your images are contributing to a fast, engaging user experience instead of slowing things down.
Conclusion
By now, you should have a clear understanding of what image SEO is and how you can use it to your advantage. Implementing even just a few of these tips will undoubtedly lead to better content engagement and an overall improvement in the visibility of your website.
However, if you need an experienced and expert SEO agency to help you with the same, Eco York is one of the best names in the industry.
Talk to our client support desk to get more details about our SEO consulting services to help your business.
