What is image SEO and why it is important?
Well! Nowadays images are standard on the internet. That is why you must optimize your images for SEO because they are essential.
Just like content, images can be good and bad for SEO. Furthermore, imagery has an impact on load speed and page size, especially videos. If images on the website are formatted incorrectly, it can slow down your website and affect the user experience.
Image SEO, what is it?
Context and speed are vital in SEO including image SEO. We aim to optimize images but whilst doing this, we also want to give Google as much information about the image as possible. Everything that is involved with the image should work together.
It can be difficult to optimize an image whilst maintaining good website speed. Furthermore, you don’t want the image to lose its quality. A poor-quality image makes your website look unprofessional and may increase the bounce rate of your website.
15 Image SEO Optimization Tips
Here are 15 tips to help with your image SEO optimization.
1.) Unique images
It should be one of your main priorities before you start worrying about anything else. It is easy to get used to using stock images for our website but dozens of other websites will be doing the same. If you upload your imagery onto the website, you started SEO optimization for your images correctly.
Although this is not a priority and a massive benefit, it still is good to have your own images. The reason is that it is original and is something that Google values highly. Google will rate images much higher compared to those websites using stock images, simply because yours are unique.
There are many ways you can have your original imagery. Firstly, you can take pictures yourself and then publish them on your site. Something else you can do is upload stock images but edit them by adding a filter or altering them slightly. Nonetheless, we strongly advise you to take pictures yourself as these can be on-brand and they are original.
2.) Don’t replace text with images
Another thing we advise is just because you are uploading images to your website. You don’t need to reduce the text there. Google loves content and content is king in the SEO world. Although Google is always looking to improve how it recognizes images, the algorithm still understands text much more than still images.
The reason why your website will rank well is because of content and there’s no other argument for that. There are hundreds of websites with great metrics and lots of images but if they do not have content, it will be unlikely they will feature on the first page.
Our tip is to plan out your content where you can fit images inside your content. Images with plenty of written content will be much better than images that reduce the amount of content you have on the page.
3.) Ensure you format your images correctly
Another essential part of image optimization is formatting the images correctly. Despite websites and all devices being able to process all image formats, there are still preferred image formats. The reason is that some formats can slow down your overall site speed which is bad for user experience and SEO.
There are four preferred image formats you need to be aware of and they are JPEG, GIF, PNG and SVG. We advise formatting images taken with a camera with JPEG. Images that are digitally created IE Photoshop images should be formatted using PNG. The GIF format should be for animated images and SVG are for raster graphics.
4.) Image dimensions
The correct image dimensions are highly recommended for image optimization. For example, it is advised that the maximum dimensions for banners should be 1500px-2500px. Anything beyond this dimension is too excessive and will slow down your website.
5.) Reduce image size where possible
One thing you should remember with SEO optimization is that the smaller the image, the faster a user will download it. The faster the image downloads for the user, the quicker the web page loads. Compress your images to improve the speed of the image being downloaded. Furthermore, if you run them through a compressor, you could potentially reduce the size of that image by 80%. All four formats we suggested can be compressed so make sure you try your best to reduce the image size.
6.) Lazyloaded imagery
Next are lazyloaded images. It is one of the best things you can do for images and here is why. These images only load when a user scrolls down to the section where the image is shown. Therefore, all the website needs to worry about is loading the content on the initial screen first. It fetches images on demand and is one of the best things you can do for optimizing your images.
7.) SEO-friendly file names
Naming your images is much more important than you may think. Not only does this make your images easier to find but it also makes it easier for Google to read and understand. Furthermore, Google will likely use these images in the search engine results page because it is a piece of information that matches the page.
8.) Relevant alt tags
Relevant alt-tags are essential when it comes to your website. Not only does it improve the user experience but it also helps Google with understanding the images as well. It is a win-win.
When optimizing the alt-tags on your website, we advise you to use the keywords which you focus on for that web page. Additionally, we advise you to use LSI as this is a modern SEO technique.
9.) Don’t make your alt-tags too lengthy
Al-tags can be short and snappy. For example, if you are ecommerce website owners, all you need to do is describe the product and then try to partially include a keyword. Then the odd time you can include an exact match of the keyword.
10.) Don’t spam keywords in alt-tags
Keywords are important in SEO but you don’t want to spam them throughout your webpage or you will be penalized for this, resulting in your rankings dropping. We advise you to use a partial match, full match and LSI for your keywords. Occasionally, you won’t want to use any keywords at all.
11.) Background images
Coding is another essential part of SEO and this includes images as well. Furthermore, one of the biggest mistakes with image optimization in SEO is that images are not part of the body of HML with the tag . Ensure that any images which do not provide context are added into the body of CSS instead. These types of images should not include alt-tags as well.
12.) Provide context with your images
It goes back to our second tip for image optimization. We strongly advise you to not randomly insert images within your content. These images must be there for a reason and should have context to those images. It is overlooked by many who work in SEO so you should look to provide context with those images on your site.
13.) Structured date images
Structured data images are also necessary for SEO optimization. Schema is rated highly by Google so it is something that you should provide your images with. Additionally, schema markup can increase the traffic landing on your website because people can see the images on the SERPs.
14.) Cache images to load them quicker
Web servers need to re-calculate and send content to a user every time it receives a new user. It adds additional stress to your hosting plan’s bandwidth and the user will have to wait longer.
To resolve this, it is much simpler than you think. It can be done by saving the existing version for the user of that page. When a user lands on your site, the web server will load a ready-made copy of that page instead of having to re-compute every time a user visits the site.
The majority of the content management systems that are available provide you with plugins which deliver a simple caching solution. To find the correct plug-in for your CMS, search on Google and then provide it with the name of your CMS.
15.) Optimize load speed with a content delivery network
Last but certainly not least, content delivery networks, also known as a CDN. For the smaller websites that have a limited hosting plan, we advise you to use a content delivery network. This hosts your images on another website and delivers the content alone.
It isn’t just small websites that can use a CDN. Large websites can also apply this due to them receiving large amounts of traffic each day. With a large amount of traffic, it puts a lot of stress on the website servers. Moreover, if you have many visitors coming from around the world, a CDN like Cloudflare will deliver your images much more quickly.
Summary
In recent years, Google has made it their priority to consider website speed as a key ranking factor. It includes core web vitals. Something that contributes to website speed is your images and if not formatted correctly or optimized for Google, this will hurt your rankings. Whether you have an eCommerce website or a service based website, you should optimize your images to improve the speed of your website.