While alt tags are essential, there’s a lot more about image optimization in SEO that every SEO professional must know.
Whether you want to attract potential customers or improve your page loading speed, image optimization plays a key role in your overall SEO strategy.
Although image optimization does not directly benefit your search engine ranking, it can help you gain a competitive advantage over other sites who don't optimize their images.
The best part is, image optimization doesn't have to be a complex task. This is so simple and straightforward.
In this blog post, we'll discuss what is image optimisation in SEO and why it's important, as well as 10 advanced image optimization strategies to help you improve your website performance - and ultimately sales.
Image Optimization in SEO
Image optimisation is the process of reducing image file size as much as possible without losing quality so that your page load times remain SEO optimized.
This is also known as Image SEO - that is getting your images to rank on search engines like Google and Bing.
Let's take a look at why image SEO is so important. Then we'll go over some proven image optimization strategies that you can use to optimize your website images.
Importance of Image Optimization
Image optimization in SEO is essential for a number of reasons.
Optimizing images leads to improved visibility on Google, which results in more organic traffic.
And, that’s the primary reason you should optimize your images, however there are numerous benefits as well:
- Improved Page Speed - Optimized images boost page loading speed, which is essential to improve SEO performance.
- Better User Experience - Users appreciate high-quality images that load fast, which leads to increased engagement and a better user experience.
- Enhance Accessibility - Adding alt text to images improves accessibility for visually impaired users. Optimizing images ensures your content is accessible to everyone.
- Reduced Bandwidth Usage - Optimised images use less bandwidth, which makes your website more efficient, especially for users with lower internet speeds.
- Keyword Optimization - Image SEO aids keyword optimization by incorporating target keywords into image file names, alt text, captions, and other related content.
As a whole, image optimization is crucial for website performance, user experience, search engine visibility, and overall SEO success.
It should be a part of any comprehensive SEO strategy since it’s a wise investment that pays off in a variety of ways.
10 Image Optimization Tips
Fortunately, image optimization isn't as challenging as the other parts of SEO.
There are some simple steps you can take to boost your site's overall image SEO score and rank higher on search engines.
Here are 10 proven tips to improve your image SEO performance :
1. Choose Right Image Format
There isn't a single best format to follow. It all depends upon the image you want to use and the purpose of using so.
Choosing the wrong file type can lead to higher file size, decreased quality, and even affect how well visitors can view your images.
The most common image formats for websites are JPEG, PNG, SVG, and GIF.
Each of them serves a different purpose and provides the highest quality for the smallest possible size.
- JPEG is widely supported and ideal for photographs and complex images with a variety of colors and gradients. It uses lossy compression, which means that an image quality may be sacrificed to meet smaller file sizes.
- PNG format is ideal for digitally created images. It uses lossless compression to maintain image quality while keeping small file sizes.
- SVG is a vector-based image format that is ideal for logos, icons, and illustrations that can be easily scaled without losing quality. This format does not have pixels like raster-based formats, such as JPEG or PNG file, rather it uses mathematical formulas.
- GIF is a popular format for animations with a limited color palette. However, using GIFs on a website may result in longer page speed, which leads to a negative user experience.
I recommend you to use PNG formats for your website's images while avoiding GIFs. PNG supports transparency and endures higher image quality, which makes it ideal for logos, icons, and graphics with cutting-edge quality.
2. Compress Your Images
Image size and file size are not the same. Image size means the dimensions of an image(e.g. 1024*680).
File size refers to how much storage space it takes up(e.g. 150kb). Large image file sizes can cause your website to load slowly, which leads to higher bounce rates.
Image compression tools, such as TinyPNG, can help you reduce image file sizes without sacrificing quality.
3. Optimize Alt Text
Alt text is a written description of an image that serves as an alternative text when the user is unable to see the image.
Alt text is also known as "alt attributes" or "alt tags."
It helps search engines to understand your image content and boosts your chances of ranking on Google Images.
When writing alt tags, try to describe your images as precisely as possible. Also, if the image is related to the page's target keywords, include them as well.
Meanwhile, if you want to spy on your competitors' alt tags, simply go to their website > right-click > click on "Inspect". You can see the alt tags in the website's code.
4. Optimize Image File Names
According to Google, it depends on the URL path and the file name to better comprehend your images. In other words, you should organize your image URLs clearly and include keywords in the file name.
Rather than using generic file names like "IMG_007.png", rename your image files with descriptive keywords.
For example, if your image showcases a wet cat food, name it "wet-cat-food.png", instead of "IMG_420.png" or "cat-food.png".
5. Enable Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique that holds up image loading until the user scrolls to the specific image area.
Lazy loading can significantly reduce initial time needed to load a page, especially for pages with multiple images.
All in all, lazy loading can improve page load speed, reduce bandwidth usage, boost mobile experience, improve user engagement, and provide more opportunities for image SEO.
All of them work together to improve image SEO and overall website performance, which ultimately helps to improve your search engine rankings.
6. Enable Broswer Caching
Browser caching is a way that allows web browsers to store static resources on a user's device, such as images, CSS files, and JavaScript files. This cached information can be used on future visits to the same website.
Browser caching has several advantages for image SEO, including faster page load speed, lower server load, better user experience, increased crawling efficiency, and bandwidth savings.
By using browser caching techniques, you can optimize image delivery and improve overall website performance, which leads to higher search engine rankings.
7. Create Image Sitemaps
Google recommends creating image sitemaps as a best practice for image SEO.
Creating a dedicated sitemap that contains the URLs of all your website images allows search engines to discover and index your images more accurately.
There's a notable difference between creating an image sitemap and the one that includes your webpages.
Image sitemaps can include URLs from multiple domains, which means you can host your images on a Content Delivery Network like Cloudflare.
8. Use Image Structured Data
Structured data, also known as schema markup, helps search engines in better understanding your website data.
You can use structured data to increase the likelihood of your images appearing as "rich results."
However, structured data doesn’t directly improve your website ranking - it does improve your image search ranking.
Take a look at Google's guidelines for more information about how to implement structured data for images.
9. Use Unique Images
When search engines like Google crawl and index your website, they evaluate the uniqueness and relevance of your website content.
By blending unique images with proper image optimisation techniques, you can maximize their impact on image SEO and boost your overall website performance.
10. Context thr Content
Although alt tags are essential they only provide a small amount of information to search engines.
So, you need to include body content on your pages to provide context to search engines.
For example, let's say you recently photographed a birthday party. Instead of simply uploading all of the photos, include them into a blog post.
This allows you to naturally use your keywords while also adding more meaningful context to your site.
FAQs
Q. What is image SEO?
Image SEO refers to the practice of optimizing images on a website in order to increase their rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Q. What is the best image file size for SEO?
It is recommended for most websites to use image file sizes of up to 150-200 kilobytes per image. However, there is no maximum size for website images.
Q. What is the best image file format for SEO?
For SEO, there is no preferred image file format. The goal is to keep images as small as possible while retaining as much data as possible. In general, I recommend PNG as long as it doesn't slow down your website too much.
Q. How to reduce image file size without losing quality?
Image compression tools like TinyPNG can help you reduce image file size without sacrificing quality.
Final Thoughts
By executing the above 10 image optimization tips, you can improve your website's SEO, user experience, and chances of getting more organic traffic and achieving higher search engine rankings.
Make sure your images provide value to users.
Don't just stuff images to satisfy crawlers, and don't include images that aren't relevant to your content.
Feel free to comment below if you have any questions!
