The Importance And 6 Easy Tips For Optimizing Images For SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to a set of techniques that makes a website rank higher on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). It comprises of several elements like website responsiveness, page load time, keyword optimization, image optimization, etc. For ensuring better rankings, it becomes important to try and optimize the website in every way possible.

One of the easiest and most important ways of making your website more competitive in the search engines is by optimizing the images for SEO. Image optimization is one of those SEO elements that many business websites overlook, which makes it even more worthwhile for you to do.

IMPORTANCE OF IMAGE SEO:

Generally, SEO is all about the texts, keywords, and user experience. But, oftentimes, marketers forget that image also has an important role to play in SEO.

Think about it: How will you feel if you land on a web page only to find that it looks similar to a Word doc with no images or graphic elements, but just plain text on a white background? There are high chances that you will bounce back from that page.

There has been much research conducted in the past that states that about 95% of users are more likely to read content that included graphical elements and 82% of them are likely to remember it afterward.

Now that you are aware of the importance of image SEO, here are 7 tips to improve your SEO for images-

1. Use relevant and high-quality images:

To make sure that your website visitors feel satisfied, avoid using images that are not relevant to the content, are blurry or poorly cropped because using these kind of images will make your web page look unprofessional and untrustworthy.

Make sure to add those images that have clear relevance to what your website is all about. Be careful to use only those images that don't have copyrights, it is always better to click or create images of your own - this will show how professional your business is.

2. Work on the file name:

This is the easiest step in the entire SEO process. Before adding any image file to your website, take some to customize the filename by changing its default name into something more descriptive and relevant to the web page.

Tip: Try to add your primary keyword in the filename.

For example, if your image is about a pizza that you sell, the name of the image could be something like brand name-pizza.jpg.

Most of the site visitors will not see the filename, but it will help the search engine with a little more information about what is on the page to determine the site's relevance for the target keyword.

3. Make use of alt tags:

Alt tags or alternative tags are another important SEO element that will help the search engine crawlers to better identify your web page's content for a particular keyword.

You can add alt text to every image that you add to your website. This way, if the browser has trouble loading the images on your website, the users will be able to know what the image is all about because of the alt text.

Alt text is another signal that you can use to let the search engine crawlers know what the website is all about. Make sure to add your primary keyword and something a little more descriptive in your images' alt text.

4. Figure out the proper quality-to-size ratio:

This step is a little tricky because you want your images to be the best quality possible without compromising on the page speed of the website which can be slowed down if the images are not properly optimized.

Generally, the actual size of the image is larger than it needs to be for appearing on the website. If you add images with their original size on the website, it might slow down the page speed. To avoid such thing from happening, you can resize your image files to fit the website properly.

You can do this by using various tools that are available on most computers like Microsoft Paint. You can also make use of "Save for Web" on Adobe Photoshop for finding the smallest file size that provides better resolution.

5. Select the right file type:

You must have noticed that there are three main types of image files - PNG, JPG, and GIF. But, do you know the difference between them?

· PNG: This file format provides high resolution and supports text descriptions that are good for SEO. It is best for complex images because it requires larger file sizes as compared to JPG and GIF.

· JPG: This is one of the most common image formats because it supports a small file size. However, it lacks the image quality as compared with PNG files and does not support transparent backgrounds.

· GIF: This format can be a good choice for simpler images, it supports all small file sizes and transparent backgrounds. However, it does not support a wide range of colors as in the case of PNG and JPG formats.

In general, JPG format works well for photos, and GIF and PNG work well for higher quality designed graphics.

6. Add images to your sitemap:

Google encourages website owners to submit their website's sitemap to help the crawlers better identify the pages and index them. Google also encourages to add images to the sitemap or create a separate sitemap with images to submit.

By adding images to the sitemap, you give Google clear information regarding what your site is about increasing the possibility of your website to rank higher in the Google Image Search, which is good for your website's rank position as a whole.

FINAL WORDS:

As compared to other strategies of SEO, image SEO is relatively easy to conduct. By investing time and effort in finding the right images and optimizing them for search, you can give your website an edge over the competitors. For further ensuring that you stand out in the SEO game, you can hire the SEO services of a professional SEO company in Delhi!