10 Most Important Image SEO Tips

Your visual content should be properly optimized for your customers as well as the search engines so that it can easily be founded and loaded without rendering the quality of  your website.

Think of the time you uploaded an image into your article by just downloading it from some stock website without any optimization.

So, what have you actually done?. You have not uploaded an image, instead you have uploaded a big garbage ball in your website which will spoil the quality of your website.

So, let's change it!

Dan Morgan ranked his image to Number 1 in Google Images in less than 4 days by just optimizing it.

A report showed that 20% of U.S. searches are related to Images. So, you can imagine that how much these images matters in the ranking of our websites in search engines.

To rank a website in a search engine, you should have an SEO-friendly content with proper image optimization. 

So, here are the 10 Important SEO Tips You Need to know

     1. Choosing Right Format

Decoding different images formats are very difficult and complex and can time, so, we should have to wisely choose the best format for our image which suits the website.

There are many file formats to choose from like PNG, JPEG etc.

   

     PNG: This format produces high quality images but at the same time it has very large file size.

     

     JPEG: You may lose quality in this format but it is the best in term of file size.

PNG no doubt is the unsung hero of image formatting. But I frequently use JPEG images when it comes to uploading it to a site. Especially when the image is large.

So, I would recommend the JPEG images to be used on website for better results.

     2. Image Compressing

According to HTTP archive, images constitute the more than 20% of a website's weight.

That's why I highly recommend using compressed images in your website.

You can compress your images for Photoshop or any other software available online.

I would suggest to use WP Smush as you plug-in because it on its own compresses the image without compromising the quality. You can use any plug-in but prefer those which have built in compressors on their servers. This will also help improve the speed of you website.

I would recommend you Google's Page Speed Insight tool to check how these images effects the speed of you web-pages. 

     3.Create Unique(Copyright free) Images

The more original photos you have, the more you get the user attention. User will share your content and it will help you rank your content in search engines.

You may have noticed that many sites have somehow the same images and the reason is, they downloaded it from the same stock websites and this is not a good practice at all.

Secondly, whichever image you selected to use, beware of the copyright claim.

Google Images allows you to search the images which have no copyright conflicts and this is a good for you people.

     4. Image File-Name

When it comes to creating an SEO-friendly article,  choosing descriptive and keyword stuffed file-names are crucial.

Good file-names alter Google and other search engines crawlers to point to your content. Images without a proper file-name are nothing.

Typically, we see file names like 'IMG_1234' or something like this. Literally, these file-names we do nothing for you and your website. So, change the image's file-name from default to the best possible to help search engine rank you website.

I would name it as 'black-chocolate-cake' instead of just 'cake' or something like 'IMG_1234'.

This would help search engine that what this picture is about.

     5. SEO-friendly ALT Text

This is the most important tip in my point of view. Imagine, if you load a website and just got render showing no image. So, probably just because of this you can not understand what this content is about. 

Alt text is the text which actually shows if your image does not get loaded. But with the help of it user can analyze what this image is about.

The alt text could read:

           <img src="black-chocolate-cake.jpg"alt="cake"/>

However, a better alternative text that describes the image would read:

             <img src="cake.jpg"alt="black-chocolate-cake"/>

This text would be available in cached text version. It can also acts as anchor text of the internal link if the image links to some other pages of your website.

     6. Making Page Title and Description

Google says that it uses your page's title and description as a part of image search algorithm.

Google Support Page says:

“Google Images automatically generates a title and snippet to best explain each result and how it relates to the user query… We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title, and meta tags.”

Your on-page SEO's like descriptions, titles, meta tags, all helps your site rank in the image search algorithms.

     7. Making Mobile Friendly Images  

To make your site rank in the search engine, you should have to make sure that it is mobile optimized or not.

 Mobile SEO's are very important in terms of site's ranking. As you know that the most of the users came from the mobile phones, so, having a good and mobile optimized, responsive template would be beneficial. 

Having worst mobile SEO will give you a large bounce rate which is not good. While t it good, it will increase the organic traffic for your site.

So, you should try to use good mobile optimized templates and than the image size came into play. Having a large file size would render the quality of display in mobile and will affect the bounce rate.

      8. Defining Dimensions

While using AMP and PWAs you should have to define the dimensions of your images.

But if you are not using either of the above, then it is not necessary but is a good practice to define the width and length of your images for better results.

It will also size the image before loading the CSS which would stops the page jumping during its loading.

     9. Image File Structure

In Google's update in 2018, it reveals that it ranks the image by following their file-name and file-paths. So, you can imagine that how these file-names and file-paths are important for ranking our images. 

 

     10. Adding Sitemaps to Your Images

Having your images in the sitemaps increases the chances that the search engine's crawlers finds and index your image. And this will increase the traffic in your site and resultantly, your image would get ranked. 

You can use sitemap solution by Yoast if you are using Wordpress.

If want to learn more about SEO-friendly Content click here.