This is the world where SEO rules everywhere. From text, video, images and infographics are interlinked to SEO. On any given date, The giant search engine Google receives 63,000 search queries. It accounts for over 79% of desktop traffic globally. Next, Bing at 7.27%, followed by Baidu at 6.55% and Yahoo 5.06%. Henceforth, 61% of marketers claim that improving their SEO strategies that helps in organic growth is one of the paramount business activities. So, along with the content image optimization is a priority. It is an art which you should learn to master it. With proper image optimization, you can reduce the bounce rate and increase the traffic.
Advantages of image optimization
On the positive side, if the right approaches are followed, image optimization has the following benefits.
- Better user experience
- Faster load times
- Increased ranking opportunities
Although images have made a stride, search engines are still unable to find the content of an image. Hence, there are a few considerations to make sure that your images are findable and will not allow your website to slow down.
Choosing the right image
There are many websites which are piled up with stock photos. If you want your website to generate traffic you have to select the correct images. Stock images like
- Common places
- Nature
- Landmarks
- Events
Will look unoriginal. Similar to other websites, they will never stand out. With this in mind think of any corporate website, a customer-centric business, or a consulting firm. They all use similar kind of image, “A smiling business-man”.
These kinds of stock images may be inauthentic to your website. Particularly, these images generate poor experience as the viewers feel bored to see the same images again and again. However, many viewers who see these stock images will ignore the sites. Hence there will be higher bounce rates.
According to statistics, this is what Google is trying to avoid. Moreover, Google even penalizes website owners who used duplicate copies. Markedly, Google also ranks the pages which have unique, original images. While sock images that are overused can receive a penalty. Moreover, these stock images are useful and save time, it is always recommendable to create one of your own. This makes you stand out from the crowd. In order to have unique images, they are numerous photo sites which are accessible easily. You can download them freely and use it commercially. Websites which can be used are
- Barn Images
- Unsplash
- Freepik
- Pixabay
- PicJumbo
- Little visuals
- SplitShire
- Jimdo
These free stock images are available in their image library in the form of JPEG. You can customize these according to your website. Rather you can create your own image.
Appropriate Format
Are you wondering which image type to use from the myriad of formats available like
- GIF
- JPEG
- PNG
- SVG
Although most of the times you may be using JPEG and PNG. These formats have their own pros and cons. If you choose the correct format, it can be an undeniable image.
Images with a lot of colour, gradient and shading can have JPEG format. In addition, this file type can handle various colours in a small, efficient size. Likewise, if most of the image is a photograph, then it is better to stick to JPEG file.
Do you want to use transparency with a logo and a picture with a solid colour? Then your option will be PNG. Together with flat areas of colours they are best suitable for images, designs, and infographics. If you have images which consist of a lot of text, then you can use PNG format. Comparatively these images are superior in quality than JPEG.
In the same fashion, if you have an animated image, you can always opt for GIF. Conversely, having an appropriate format with the right size. Most compelling evidence is these images can influence a lot in the future. At present, there are many business owners who are willing to have a visual appearance. Alongside, there are 51% of B2B marketers who are actively investing in visual assets than their counterparts.
Name your images in a crisp and plain language
It is important to realize, that having a descriptive image name supported by keywords works magic. Additionally, it helps the website crawlers to get straight to the image in your website. By all means, if you are uploading an image from a camera, the default name is “IMG_627019”, or similar to this.
Edit the file name so as to make understandable to search engines. To put it differently, this helps in increasing the SEO value. By the same token, it depends on your hard work. This always depends on your customer analysis. Think on the perspective of the customer,
How do they search your website
What keywords do they use
Which naming patterns will they implement
As an illustration, if you have used the image of Ford car. Mostly, your customers will search based on keywords like
- Ford Mustang gt
- Shelby gt500
- Interior of Ford Mustang
Look at the analytics for your website and the keywords pattern. Consider your competitors and use the naming pattern and apply the same on your website. If you didn’t get the desired data-driven results, then use relevant keywords which are helpful while naming your image. In this case, you need to edit the HTML of your image and do it manually every time you upload the image. To put in other words, the name should be short, keywords infused and accurate to the subject of your website.
Resize your Image
In the first place, to work with the web images, it should have the right resolution and the file size. Resolution and the file sizes are proportionate to each other. The higher the image resolution the larger will be the file size. Conversely, this is the world of print.
Hence, having a higher resolution image is good for your website or blog. But this is the world of digitalization, having a high-resolution image can slow your website. In turn, having a higher bounce rate. Besides, the customer leaves the page unsatisfactorily. Nonetheless, this even annoys mobile users. This eventually decreases the ranking. So how to strike the right balance between quality and size.
At the same time, the image size on the web is measured in terms of pixels, where the ideal size is 795*300 pixels. The overall size should not be much larger than this. One of the best approaches to attain this is to use Adobe Photoshop and apply “save for web” feature.
Amid this, there are other tools which can be utilized to resize your image. Some of these tools are
- PicMonkey
- Pixlr
These can be used by both beginners and professionals. Most of these tools can compress your image and make it web-friendly. Compress the images by using TinyJPG and TinyPNG. This will significantly decrease the file size without affecting the quality.
Optimize Alt-text
A word or a phrase alternatively inserted in an HTML document to signify the nature of the content of the image. This usually appears in the blank box, that represents the image. Certainly, these are the ones which come handy when there is a broken link or any changes in URL. Explicitly, the alt attribute is visible when images are not loaded properly on to the page. At the same time, make sure that they have to be the right fit and relevant.
Equally important to pay careful attention to SEO strategies and optimize in case the image fails to load. In this light, users can guess what the image signifies. Additionally, this helps to rank your website by associated keywords. Even Google has made changes to alt attributes to the remarkably. It offers Google with useful insights on the image. Additionally, this information can be used to respond to the user’s query.
Moreover, alt text helps in specifying what is there in the image. For instance, If you have a picture of “Duster car” on your website, then the alt text displays as <img src= “car-1.jpg” alt= “car”/>. More precisely, it can be read as <img src= “car-1.jpg” alt= “red coloured duster car”/>
Alt text is visible on the cached text version of any page. It helps the viewers and search engines. Furthermore, it can also act as anchor text for internal links when the image has links on a different page.
Key Take Aways
Images are pivotal to rank among the search engines. Albeit, if the image SEO is planned accordingly, then there will be a chance for maximized search positions. Moreover, images help you to connect well with the audience. There is every need to optimize your images according to the SEO strategies. As the people are impatient and will no longer wait for the site to spin over. Another key point is the search engine like Google, Bing etc is now starting to penalize the websites, which has slow load times. Hence, it is important that the images and alt attributes are most unique and relevant. By following few steps above, these can take a step further in image SEO.
