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How to Optimize Images For SEO

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How to optimize images for SEO

How to optimize images for SEO

Images are an essential component of any website or blog. Not only do they help break up text and make your content more visually appealing, but they’re also important factors that Google looks at to determine a website’s SEO ranking.

In fact, the more relevant and optimized your images are, the better your website will perform in the search results. When appropriately configured, images improve your website’s SEO in a number of ways, including:

  • Help Google understand your website.
  • Help improve your website’s click-through rate.
  • Help enhance the time people spend on your website.

So, instead of asking, “why should I optimize my images for SEO?” a better question would be, “how can I optimize my images for SEO?”

This article will walk through effective optimization techniques to help your images rank higher in the search results and maximize their impact. By the end of this article, you should understand proper image strategies and how to use them to improve your website’s overall performance.

Let’s get started!

Basic Image Optimization Techniques

First, let’s talk about some basic image optimization techniques that you can use to improve your website’s SEO.

1.    Choose the Right File Name

The first step in arranging your pictures for SEO is to give them descriptive, keyword-rich file names. Doing so will help Google understand the image and index it accordingly.

For example, if you download a dog’s picture, you should name it “brown-dog.jpg” instead of leaving the file name to the default name and number such as “IMG1234.jpg”.

Integrating an informative file name will aid in the discovery process of the viewers. Ultimately, this will increase organic traffic to your site.

So, how do you choose the correct file name for your images?

Here are a few tips to remember:

  • Include your target keywords but avoid stuffing. For instance, if your brand provides services for “new landscape design” and “landscape remodeling,” don’t name the picture as “landscape-design-new-remodel.” Instead, use a different keyword in the file name of each picture to enhance visibility.
  • Use dashes (-) to separate the words in the file name rather than underscores (_).
  • Keep things short and sweet. Longer names are more likely to be shortened in the search results, making them less effective. Ideally, you should use 5 – 6 words in your file name.

2.    Choose the Right Dimensions

The second step in optimizing your images is to ensure that they’re the right size. This means choosing the appropriate width and height for your photos.

If your images are too large, they’ll slow down your website and hurt your SEO. On the other hand, if they’re too small, they will fail to grab attention and won’t help drive traffic.

So, how do you choose the correct dimensions for your images?

Here are a few tips:

  • Use pictures that are at least 1200px wide. This will ensure that your pictures are high-quality and look good on retina displays.
  • Choose dimensions that are in proportion to one another. For example, if you’re using an image with a landscape orientation (horizontal), you want the width to be significantly larger than the height.
  • If you’re using an image with portrait orientation (vertical), you want the height to be significantly larger than the width.

3.    Choose High-Quality Images

Quality is a key factor when it comes to the selection of pictures. A high-quality and relevant picture impacts SEO, user experience, and conversions positively.

People love looking at visuals that boast superior quality. When visitors see a low-quality image, they perceive the business as inadequate. This can lead them to click away from your website and look for a competitor.

Remember, what works for users works with the Google algorithm too. Algorithms are designed to mimic user behavior, so it only makes sense that high-quality images would be favored.

But the things: Not every business can afford to hire a professional photographer for their product images. And not every company has the time or resources to create original visuals.

In that case, the best alternative is to invest in stock photos. There are many high-quality, affordable options for businesses of all sizes.  42% of marketers have said stock photos are the most frequently used visuals in marketing campaigns. They are available in various categories/niches and have the availability to transform your branding favorably. You can also get an istock promo code for fantastic discounts on istock images.

Advanced Image Optimization Techniques

Once you have chosen the proper file name and dimensions for your images, there are a few advanced techniques that you can use to further boost SEO.

Some of these techniques include:

1.    Use SEO-friendly Image Alt Text

Image alt text or alt tag is a short description that you can add to your images. It’s crucial for SEO because it tells the search engine what your image is about. This can help your photo appear in relevant search results and improve your SEO.

Using relevant alt text can improve a user’s experience on your website. Suppose a webpage fails to display on a user’s screen due to a slow internet connection. In this case, the alt text will appear in the place of the media file to describe the picture.

A visually impaired individual who uses screen readers also benefits from alt tags as they are read aloud to them for better explanation.

Alt-text allows you to add the main keyword to your photos, which can help them rank higher in search results. However, Google emphasizes that you shouldn’t stuff keywords into alt text.

Instead, write descriptions that are relevant and easy to understand.

See how Google differentiates between good and bad image alt text:

When writing your alt text, focus on creating short and accurate descriptions that clearly convey what your image is about.

1.    Devise a Sitemap

Google says: a sitemap is “a database where you give information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site.”

 Sitemaps are essential for SEO because they help the search engine understand your website’s structure and index its contents precisely.

A sitemap for images is similar to the one you create for the pages of your website. Start by gathering all of your image URLs. Several tools are available to help you generate a sitemap for your photos.

Make sure that you keep your sitemap up to date and send it to Google Search Console whenever you add new images or make any changes to your site.

If you don’t create a sitemap, Google may not be able to properly index your images or interpret their relevance. This can negatively impact your SEO and make it harder for users to find your pictures.

2.    Make Images Mobile-Friendly

We live in a mobile-first world, and your website should reflect that. Images are no exception. If they aren’t correctly sized or formatted for mobile devices, they can lag during loading or appear distorted. This will eventually frustrate the users.

If you are using WordPress, it auto-generates a mobile-friendly version of your images. If you aren’t using WordPress, you can use a tool like Mobile-Friendly Test to test the mobile-friendliness of your website.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, images are an integral part of your website’s content. They can significantly improve user experience and help you rank higher in search engine results.

You can’t neglect image optimization if you want your site to perform well in today’s highly competitive digital landscape.

Following the tips above can help you create and optimize high-quality images to improve your SEO and help you achieve your business goals.

The importance of image link building

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Using images for link building

Using images for link building

Some of my clients have observed that in my blog updates I am paying special attention to the quality of the images I use these days.

Although normally they are a mash up of images that I find in Google images and other places, these days I try to make them as unique as possible by combining multiple images and text.

Not everybody can create nice-looking images, and this is where image link building can help you.

Have you ever noticed that when people use an image from another website or blog, they normally mention the “source”?

This gave me an idea. I normally find it very difficult to approach other publishers and bloggers (doesn’t mean I don’t) for backlinks.

As you know, people don’t go on distributing their backlinks. They either really need to know you, or you need to offer them something really compelling, or something they cannot resist linking to.

Being a content writer, writing blog posts comes easy to me, but most of the time, either I’m writing for my clients, or for myself.

Somehow, I cannot bring myself to writing blog posts for other websites and blogs. At least not right now. Maybe in future, when I will feel that my own blog and website have had enough of my writing, I will start writing for other blogs and websites.

Most of the backlinks that I currently have come from a few news websites because I also write journalistic articles and opinion pieces. But that is not sufficient.

I like creating images. This is not my profession and I don’t do this for money, so maybe I enjoy it more. But that’s beside the point.

Many bloggers and online publishers are constantly looking for good images. Major search engines like Google and Bing have dedicated image search sections. There is a complete website dedicated to curating images: Pinterest.

Talking of Pinterest, if you want people to pin your images try to make them as relevant as possible to your blog post or web page. This will get you more clicks from Pinterest.

What I’m trying to say is, there is a big world that revolves around images. This opportunity can be tapped into. You can encourage people to link to you due to the quality of your images.

Will give you a small example: Recently I published a web page dedicated to my blog content writing services. Actually, I have created multiple web pages, but I was just testing whether the images that I have used with these web pages show up in the image search results or not.

Just to make sure that Google was giving me unbiased results I used the “incognito mode” of the browser.

When I searched for “blog content writing services” on google.com I found the following images from my website:

Google image search results for the phrase blog content writing services

Google image search results for the phrase blog content writing services

I hovered the cursor over the image thumbnail and this is why the various thumbnails are showing image dimensions and the website link.

There are other images too, but I haven’t shown all the images here.

Before the weekend I also published “6 Indisputable Benefits of Content Marketing” and I created two graphics for it. If you search for “benefits of content marketing”, you find both these images in the image search results:

Google image search results for the phrase benefits of content marketing

Google image search results for the phrase benefits of content marketing

How to use images for link building?

When you are creating or mashing up images for your website or blog, think from the perspective of a person who would one day like to use your image.

Does it offer some useful insight? A statistic, for example?

Many people creating presentations and slides will like to use your image with data.

After you have created the image, do you think people would like to use it?

This brings to my mind that with my images, I use my website link to make sure that one, people know that from where the image is coming, and two, they don’t use the image as their own. I’m not sure if this is a good tactic or not because if I include my link, it may deter them from using the image and linking to my website as “source”.

Anyway, the idea for this present blog post that I’m writing about the importance of using images for link building, came to me when I was going through my Twitter timeline and came across an update from Moz.

They publish weekly videos titled “Whiteboard Friday” in which they give very useful SEO tips.

In their latest Whiteboard Friday video, they have talked about how to use images for link building.

Aside from creating very striking and useful images, I think you should also aim for improving your search engine rankings in the image search results.

I have recently started following these points while using images on my website and blog:

  • Name the image file with a descriptive phrase. For example, if I’m creating a blog post about content marketing, some way or the other, I try to make sure that the phrase “content marketing” appears within the name of the image file.
  • Use the .PNG format when saving the images. This will allow you to create very light images without losing their quality and sharpness. This is something that I discovered just recently. Google prefers the .PNG format.
  • Describe the image using the ALT tag. Never misguide – the text in the ALT tag must represent what is being shown in the image.
  • Use image captions. This is also something that I have just started using a few days back and this has shown a marked improvement in my image search engine rankings. Caption is an HTML tag that you can enclose your image in and in the caption text, try to use your keyword. Again, use the caption text contextually, not irrelevantly.
  • Use appropriate text around the image. Although technology these days allows computers to read text with images and there are many algorithms that can tell what is inside the image (a tiger jumping over a fallen tree, for example), the image ranking algorithms still depend upon the information existing around the image to make out what the image represents.

These are the few measures you can take to make sure that your images enjoy better search engine rankings.

Rankings are important. No matter how good your images are, if people are not able to find them, they’re not going to help you in image link building.