Image Optimization For SEO: 10 Ways To Make Your Images More Appealing

Have you worked with your full brain and heart on your website SEO? But… still, you could be missing enough traffic, if the images of your site are not optimized for SEO. 

Image SEO is important as it helps Google better understand your site or web page. Along with that, you have more chances of having higher visibility. The images also rank in Google SERP. 

In this blog, you are going to learn about what image optimization for SEO is, why it matters for SEO, and how to optimize your images for SEO. 

Why Is Image Optimization Important For SEO?

Do you know 22.6% of search queries get answered by image results in Google? Which could be a great reason to work on image optimization. 

So, if you are not working on image optimization for SEO, you are missing out on a significant amount of traffic. Aren’t you?

Image SEO could be helpful for you due to two main reasons:

• Images got a chance to rank on image searches 
• Image SEO is also a part of On-page SEO

If I come to discuss the image optimization for SEO as a part of on-page SEO, it can help you in the following ways:

• Improvement in User-experience: If you are one who doesn’t like to read long blogs, then you must be dependent on the blog image to understand the concept. For such users, you must have appealing images that are easy to navigate by improving the UX. 

• Improved Site Speed: If you are familiar with SEO, you must have an idea about how much website load speed matters for SEO. images can improve your website or can even slow down your website as hell and ultimately lead it to down rankings. 

• More accessible site: Your web images are also responsible to make your site easy to navigate. Having good website accessibility is good for users and search engines too. 

The images of your site have a direct impact on the SEO and UX. So, make sure it is an appealing one. 

But, again the question is how can you be sure? For that, you need to read the blog till last. 

Image Optimization Tips For Your Website

Before we get started with image optimization for SEO, here is some good news that I would like to share and that is, image optimization is not as complicated as it may seem. 

Here’s what all you need to know:

Have A Right Image File Type

Have you seen any of your web pages with blurry or incorrectly displayed images even though there is nothing wrong with the image? Well, it happens because of the wrong image file type or format. 

You have to be careful with your image file type as it directly affects your page load speed. Let me explain:

There are mainly two types of image formats there, like JPEG, and PNG.

JPEG is one of the most popular types of image formats. Generally, they are good at preserving the colors of your images. JPEG uses lossy compression which results in the loss of some data while compressing them. So, they are not ideal mainly for web images. 

And, on the other hand, PNG does not lose the data or color while compressing, but it has a larger size. So, the PNG format is also not ideal for websites. 

Google Lighthouse and page speed insights suggest some ideal formats for images like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. 

And, among those, WebP is a must-have format. However, you can use the WebP format for blog images, and screenshots. Use PNG format for the featured image of your blogs, icons, logos, or the images where people need to zoom in to read. 

Properly Name Your Images

In Google’s image SEO guide, Google claims that it is important to have an appropriate name for your image file. 

Let me explain the concept with the help of an example. 

Here’s Zara footwear:

Any image may show you the image name, IMG0007.JPG. But, Google doesn’t like such names as it becomes difficult to understand what the image is all about. 

This image would be better if it were named, metallic-animal-print-platform-sandals.JPG. The image would have been easier to understand with this image name. 

Have a descriptive name for your web images before uploading them, and don’t forget to add hyphens to separate words.  

Compress Images When Necessary

Image compression is an important process of image optimization for SEO, making your large images smaller so that they don’t make your website slow to load. 

Image compression works by compressing the size of the image while maintaining its quality. The goal is to minimize the file size without compromising the quality. 
There are some image compression tools like, GIMP, TinyPNG, Smush, and MinifyWeb

Have An Image Sitemap

Simply put, sitemaps help you organize the content, or URL, of your webpage. You can use existing sitemaps or create new sitemaps for images that collect all the URLs of the images. It helps Google find your images easily, as Google can’t find them through crawling.  

The image sitemap can also contain images from other domains. That means, you can host your images on the CDN. 

See the sample sitemap below:

You can create image sitemaps manually, or there is a tool Angeldigital.marketing available, which you can use to create sitemaps. 

Add Correct Alt Text

Alt text (alternative text) is a text that you use for description of any image on your site. Since, Google or any other search engine can’t read the images or videos that you upload, the texts are used as descriptions for Google. 

It contributes to your site’s accessibility for users and shows the text when the image is broken. See the example below:

Alt text also helps improve the SEO of your web page by adding relevancy signals to a webpage. 

It looks something like this in HTML tags:

But, no worries! You don’t need to write like that. If you are a WordPress user, you can simply click on any image, and there will be a box open, where you need to put an alt text. 

Also, the technique is writing an alt text:

Your main target keyword – description of image. 

Bad alt text – white dog 

Good alt text – A white golden retriever sitting on the sofa.

Make Sure The Images Are Mobile-Friendly

If you upload images in the right format, they should appear appealing for image optimization for SEO. However, things can go wrong sometimes. 

59% of global traffic comes from mobile devices. I am sure, you don’t want to dissatisfy that traffic. 

For that, you can check your web pages from various mobile devices to ensure if all the images are appearing perfect. However, you should also keep in mind that the images could appear a little different on tablets, PCs, iPhones, and other Android devices.   

Also, you can check your website in Google’s mobile friendly test to see if any of your images are not slowing down your site. 

Read More: An Introduction To Mobile SEO Best Practices

Use Schema Markup

Schema markup stands for structured data. Suppose, you want to write a book of short-stories, so you asked 10 people to give you each short-story. Rather than everyone having to send their own story, character names, titles, and themes, you created a form and asked them to fill it up. 

Now, you have all the stories in the same format, with a list of character names, character sketches, themes, and the main title. 

This is exactly what the schema markup on your site does. 

This is what it looks like:  

Here are the main three types of image schema:

• Logo
• Layout image 
• Photo 

This is quite a technical section, so leave it to a technical SEO specialist.

Use Content Delivery Network

Let me elaborate on CDN (Content Delivery Network) in brief first. CDN makes your web pages load quickly. CDN are a network of servers based on different locations. 

Suppose your website server is based in the USA. So, your site will load quickly when any user opens it in the USA rather than India. 

Check out the image below to understand the origin of the server and other CDNs. 

However, you can easily set up a CDN network in your WordPress account through a plugin, W3 Total Cache. 

Upload Images In Next-Gen Formats

It is suggested by the Google PageSpeed insights, the images should be in next-gen formats. 

If you are wondering, “What is the next-gen format?” 

Let me clear it, it is  JPEG 2000, JPG XR, and WebP. Next-gen formats are superior to JPG and PNG. 

Encoding your images in this format can help your website load faster than ever. There are several free online tools available to convert your images from PNG and JPG to WebP format.  

Add Captions On Your Images

If your website is built on WordPress, you must have seen this: 

There is an option to write a caption with the image that you upload. It does not impact SEO directly, but unlike alt text captions, it is visible and enhances the user-experience on your site. 

Conclusion

Image optimization for SEO is necessary for creating a good user-experience and reducing bounce rates. It is also helpful in maintaining a good conversion rate. So, these are the main reasons why you should go with image optimization. 

There are various ways you can work on image optimization. Some of the tips are given above. If you apply those tips, you will see results like good page load speed, lower bounce rate and higher rankings for sure! 

However, if you feel stuck anywhere, feel free to give a call to our experts. 

FAQs

1. What does “image optimization” mean?

Image optimization is simple to understand. It is optimization of your website on the level where Google and users can understand what your image is all about. 

2. Why is image optimization important?

Image optimization is one of the SEO tactics used to improve other elements of your website, like, page load speed, bounce rate, and other elements related to SEO. 

3. What is the best image format for SEO?

Anyone can choose any image format as per their requirements. But, I would suggest PNG for featured images and next-gen format for other images on your site.