How To Optimize Images for SEO: Guide 101

Hey SEOs,

Let’s Talk about how you can effectively optimize your images for Google to love them and show them in search results.

The process is easy and just has a few steps involved which can be implemented on your website be it a WordPress website or a website built on any other platform.

SEO is a process of different methods for the promotion of a website. Image optimization for SEO is an amazingly effective type of search engine for promotions.

Most of the time, you consider optimization on search engines merely regarding text containing relevant keywords.

However, a web-page is more likely to catch the attention of users if it includes images too.

How To Optimize Images for SEO

It is likely to find an image almost on every page. You waste an important asset in case you are ignoring to properly optimize images for SEO. The bounce rate of a website has a lot to matter when you wish to increase the page rank over the globe.

Images with large sizes delay the page load speed leading to the chances of higher bounce rate.

Search engine crawlers catch the text behind images that you may use as your keywords. Whereas the application of visual search technology hinders search engine bots from identifying image content.

This technology totally depends upon the text in relation to the image.

How Can You Make the Best Use of Image Optimization?

Now the question arises, how can you make the best use of image optimization? It is important to use high-quality images that give your customers an idea about your company. Try to create these images at your own company with a high definition camera so as the images will be original and relevant to the website content.

Most of the people get an idea about your company from the visual aspects of a website. You can also share the concept of your story by adding useful screenshots.

In the end, you just want people to know your concept by adding images. Try to use screenshots for the text of your blogs and articles. It helps viewers stay on the webpage longer resulting in better page rank outputs.

Never go for the stock photos of another website. Do not risk yourself a lawsuit by indulging in a copyright conflict. But if you still want to get images for free then use search engine filters to find the reusable images.

If you still have gone with stock images of other websites, the best way is to use image tools to modify images as per your requirements. Then they will not look like copied material. These tools can also help you create your own infographic and beautify the images to attract viewers.

Images can be of different kinds too. One of the most effective types is JPEG. You will be using this type of image very often while optimization. JPEG does not lose quality when you compress or resize your image.

Hence, it is still a high-quality image despite you have compressed it. With the help of JPEG images, pictures with smaller sizes also provide high quality with a great look and feel. This type is unanimously accepted and used all over the world.

Another type is PNG. In case you have to work with Photoshop to get your images, then you need to export them in this format. People mostly create logos with this type. You will notice that resolution remains very high in proportion to image size.

The third type of image is GIF. It is useful for animation and art graphics. This format has transparent backgrounds. However, it is not much use for optimization.

Your webpage is about to increase page load time if you do not optimally size your images. In a WordPress website, so many useful tools help in resizing and compressing your images to reduce their size. It ultimately helps increase page speed as you can save lots of kbps by decreasing page load time.

You need to resize your images in accordance with the width of your webpage. Photoshop also offers features for exporting images as per the web compatibility norms.

Different website platforms require useful tools that suit them online. When manually editing an image, you need to ensure that you have not distorted the image by reducing the size more than it requires.

Adding captions to images also can help you out to a great extent. You can insert captions under an image as an explanation for your promotional material. Search engines pick captions text more often than the other article content. With the help of captions, one can easily understand what the image is all about.

At the same time, it is also important that you do not keep adding captions where they are not required. Unnecessary insertion of captions can be a disadvantage for you instead of being an asset.

You have to be very careful while choosing the text for images. Search engines pick the text which is more precise to the image. For instance, in case you are selling bed sheets and you name it bed sheet under every image, it is not going to be effective at all.

It is best to vary the titles such as 100% cotton bed sheet, polyester bed sheet, cartoon design bed sheet, etc. This process will make your images more precise to the content and users can understand the image properly.

Another important thing is that, when you upload an image, it looks a bit like “AKSJS465”. Do not upload it with that name. It is best to rename the context to the keywords or the text that you are using on your website. It is best to manually change the HTML code for each image to get the best outcome.

It is necessary to use ‘an alt attribute’ while describing the content of your image. In some cases when the net speed is low, you will find an image box with no image but alt text will still appear.

It is really important for this text to be relevant to the image. Over here users cannot see your image but still, they get an idea about your image which will help them stay longer on your webpage.

A great advantage of alt text is that it also appears in the Google cached pages. Hence, it is an essential asset to promote your website both between users and search engines.

The application of the above can keep you ahead of your competitors. No doubt you need to put some extra effort into image optimization but it makes a considerable difference in the SEO market.

Hope this article helped in understanding how to optimize images for SEO. If you want to add on something please feel free to add that in the comment section and also share this with others if you think it can be helpful for them.