10 Jan 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
There is no denying it. You must use images if you want to build a good website. People are drawn to images, which keep them interested. They make your material more accessible and play an essential role in brand communication.
Images provide context to search engines, which can help you rank higher. Even so, if they aren’t optimized, they might cause your website to slow down, degrade the user experience, and lower your Quality Score.
If you’re interested in improving your search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll want to learn how to optimize your photographs.
Always make use of visuals
Before we get into how to optimize your photographs, it’s crucial to stress the importance of including images on your website. It would help if you used pictures to write a blog article or develop a landing page.
Images keep people’s attention and improve the entire user experience, which might help you earn a good Google reputation.
Furthermore, picture search is becoming increasingly significant. Putting time and effort into image SEO now could pay off in the future by bringing in more traffic.
Be unique (where possible)
If you have original photos, graphics, or images, utilize these instead of stock photos wherever possible. Authentic images are better for SEO, in addition to providing better branding.
The truth is that many websites employ stock photos, which implies that ranking for those images will be difficult.
Furthermore, when you invest in high-quality, unique photographs, your website’s users will have a better experience, which could improve your rankings.
Use the proper format
What sort of file should you use on your website: JPEG, PNG, or GIF? It all depends on what you’re attempting to accomplish.
JPEG is best for photos with a lot of color or detail, whereas PNG is best for simple images such as line drawings. When you need a moving image, use GIF, and for logos and icons, use SVG.
When you use the correct file format, you can reduce file size while keeping excellent visual quality. If you want to rank well on Google, you must speed up your site.
Images should be resized
The number of pixels along the length and width of an image is referred to as image dimensions.
Images of a higher resolution and more excellent dimensions can cause your website to slow down, so make sure you resize your vision for the way you want it to appear on your site.
To figure out what size your image should be, look at the measurements of your website. If your website’s maximum content width is 720px, for example, resize your image’s width to match.
Keep in mind that you may require a different size depending on whether you’re using the image in a blog or as a feature banner image.
Images should be compressed
Just because you’ve optimized your image size, as indicated in point 4, doesn’t mean the file size has been optimized as well. Large file sizes will slow down your website and increase the likelihood of a higher bounce rate.
Google dislikes slow websites because it wants its consumers to be happy
As a result, you should compress your photographs to make them as tiny as possible while maintaining high quality. JPEGmini and ImageOptim are two programs that can assist you with this.
Make your photos responsive to mobile devices
People nowadays access web pages on their phones and mobile devices, and Google is aware of this. If you want to rank well, make sure your website is mobile-friendly, including mobile-optimized photos.
Your photos must be responsive, meaning they can resize themselves when viewed on a mobile device. To see if your images are responsive, look for the srcset attribute.
File names should be optimized
The name you provide the picture file might impact your on-page SEO and image search rankings.
Use the most important keywords at the start of the file name as a rule of thumb. Make sure your file names are understandable to humans as well as algorithms. Also, don’t cram too much information into your file names; keep it basic and descriptive. A hyphen should be used to separate words.
Don’t forget about the alt tags
When a browser can’t load an image correctly, it uses alt tags to provide alternate text. They also improve the accessibility of your website for visitors with vision impairment.
Alt tags should and humanely convey what’s in the image. Use keywords in the alt tags to help Google understand the image.
There is no ideal number of words for alt tags, although more information than the file name should be included. Just stay away from keyword stuffing.
Make captions
Captions make it easier for visitors to scan a page on a website. Visitors will read the captions in many circumstances instead of the article’s original text.
To put it another way, captions are essential for the user experience. They may assist in keeping visitors interested, lowering bounce rates, and safeguarding your Google reputation.
Captions should only be used when they are relevant to the visitor. You should avoid keyword stuffing or overdoing it, like with all of the other strategies in this book.
Get assistance with SEO
While optimizing your photos for Local SEO will help, you must do many more things to achieve positive results.
It’s not always easy to do SEO properly, particularly if you’re a beginner. Don’t hesitate to seek assistance from an SEO Perth firm that can help your company succeed.
SEO is one of the most powerful strategies for getting more organic website visitors and increasing revenue when done correctly.
Data That Is Structured
Use structured data markup to help Google and other search engines produce better visual results. If you add structured data to your photographs, Google may present them as a rich result.
If you use schema markup on a product page and label an image as a product, Google may associate that image with a price tag. Search engines skip the algorithm and rely on the information provided in structured data to deliver the right image.
Increase the number of images in your sitemap.
You want photos somewhere in your sitemaps, whether you’re adding them to your existing sitemap or building a new one only for images.
Including your photographs in a sitemap boosts the likelihood of search engines crawling and indexing them. As a result, there is an increase in site traffic.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast and RankMath have plugins that include a sitemap generator.
Conclusion
Image optimization is no laughing matter. With developments in voice search technology, media is becoming increasingly important, and following the methods above will help your entire site.
