Marketers put all their good efforts into search optimize their websites to increase visibility and attract more visitor traffic. They work on every element of the website say content, user experience, navigation, and website structure to make sure it’s perfect all the way.
However, while doing this, one major element that they often overlook is the optimization of images being used on the website. Optimizing your website images can very much improve your website's search engine ranking, website speed, and user experience.
Image Search Engine Optimization Strategies
In this blog post, I will cover several image optimization tactics that you can follow to improve your website's search visibility and user experience.
Image Size and Format
Image size and format play a crucial role in website speed. Large images can significantly slow down your website, resulting in a poor user experience. Thus, before uploading an image, resize or compress it. You might take the help of various image compression tools available including Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and TinyPNG.
Image Alt Text
An image alt text is a piece of text that describes what the image is all about. Besides a well-sized image. This description appears when the image is not loaded. Search engines use alt text to understand the context of the image being used to index it properly. Thus, it’s more than essential to use an appropriate alt text for every image you’re using on the website. This text should be crisp, within the character limit, and easy to understand.
Image Naming
The name of your image is the next important element in image optimization. Crawlers use image names to determine the image content. When choosing a name for the image, find a descriptive and easy-to-understand file name for each image on the website. Use keywords in the name that accurately describes the image. Don’t use generic names such as image001.jpg or picture.png as they don’t serve the purpose.
Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is another image element that helps in Image SEO. This is a file that hosts all the information about the images you’re using on the website. An image sitemap is a file that contains information about all the images on your website. Bots utilize the sitemap file to understand and index your images.
These files can help you improve your website's search engine ranking. To create an accurate sitemap, you can take the help of several sitemap generator tools such as Google's XML Sitemap Generator or Yoast SEO. Once created, you can submit it to search engines.
Image Captions
You can image caption appearing right below the image. The caption text helps search engine crawlers to understand the image. This is the text that helps search engines understand the image and ascertain its additional context. improve the user experience by providing additional context for the image.
Make sure that your image captions are descriptive and consist of focus keywords. Stick to the word limit and utilize it properly. When writing image captions, focus on language and tone.
Image Content
The relevance and content of the images being used on the website help to improve user experience and search ranking. To ensure relevancy, use high-quality images that match your content. Using irrelevant images or images acquired from stock image websites can’t help much.
Lazy Loading
With the lazy loading technique, you can ensure that images are loading when they are visible on the user's screen. The technique plays a crucial role in improving your website's loading speed since it considerably cuts the amount of data that needs to be loaded when a page is opening. Currently, there are several plugins, tools, and extensions available to help you with Lazy loading.
Image Compression
Images compression is a technique to reduce the size of images without compromising their quality. Files that are compressed in size take less time to load. It considerably improves the website loading speed. You can take advantage of several image compressions such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and TinyPNG for image compression.
Responsive Images
When uploading the images, make sure that they are responsive and optimized for the screen size of any device being used whether desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Mobile responsiveness is now an important ranking signal that significantly improves a website’s user experience and search engine ranking.
There are several plugins and browser extensions available that can be used to apply responsive images on the website. It will ensure that a website is looking excellent on every device it is used on.
Conclusion:
Image optimization is a crucial aspect of website search engine optimization. It ensures that all the images that are used on the website are properly optimized for maximum user experience both for search engines and users equally. This is the only way out to get more out of your website images and take your website's SEO to the next level.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.