10 Tips of Image Optimization for Websites | Image SEO

Before we discuss our main topic i e Tips of Image Optimization for Websites | Image SEO, we need to know, Importance of images on websites.

Importance of images on websites?

Why Images are Important for a Website? It is a very important question before we discuss on Image Optimization for Websites or image SEO. We know that the main purpose of a website is to share valuable information to its users and images are one of the best ways to share information. Images can tell your story quickly and more effectively than words, therefore, it is rightly said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Some benefits of using an image on a website are as under:

1. Bring More Visitor And Clicks

Well images get better visibility in Google and in result bring more traffic on website. That’s the number one reason sites need to optimize their images. Quality image grabs the user attention and also spark emotions and draw us in. Resultantly chances of clicking on website increase many times.

2. Improve User Experience

Good user experience plays an important role in a website search ranging and Images improve the user experience and help to present important information in a more attractive way. By improving image quality of your website, visitors will be more likely to stay on your website.

3. Increase More Sale

Every buyer likes to see the product before buying it and the image makes it easier to decide. Therefore a quality image increases the chance of sale.

4. Higher Search Engine Ranking

Quality images also contribute in higher search engine ranging. Faster site speed significantly impacts on SEO. When Images are large in size or incorrectly formatted its slow down your site speed and adversely affect the site ranking as well.

5. More Memorable

Images store in our brains much faster than words and our brains store images long time as compare to text.

10 Tips of Image Optimization for Websites | Image SEO

Image optimization for websites is not as complicated as other aspects of SEO, with the help of some tips you can optimize images on your website and get higher rank on search engines:

1. Use High-Quality Relevant Images

Tip number for Image Optimization is to use highly quality and relevant images. Highly quality and relevant images are very important for the user experience point of view and impacts on overall SEO of a website. A good user experience greatly impact on SEO. If an image is blurry it makes your page look bad and shows unprofessional approach. It is also desirable that image should relate to the content of your website. An unrelated image confused to the user and bad effect on user experience.

It is also worth mentioning that you do not use copyrighted images at all. Try to create your own image, if it is not possible use copy right free images available on internet like pixabay, Pexels, unsplash, Canva etc.

2. Write SEO Friendly Image File Name

For describing images it is important to write SEO friendly image file name. Visitors will never see the filename, but it gives you a way to provide the search engines a little more information about what’s on the page and the best keywords to associate with it. The following points should be kept in mind while naming the image file:

Use your primary keywords in image file name.

Image file name should be descriptive like black-puppy.jpg or eiffel-tower.jpg. Avoid file name like EYZ12345.jpg.

Do not use blank spaces in image file names e.g digital marking course

Use hyphen (-) not underscore ( _ ) in the name of an image. e g use "digital-marketing-course" instead of "digital_marketing_course"

Do not use special characters (eg @, #, &, % etc) in image file names.

Don’t use words like "image of cat" or "photo of cat" because crawler knows it is an image, just described what’s in a photo or image?

Keep file name in optimum length

Avoid keyword stuffing, don’t use a keyword many times in image name.

3. Always Use Alt Image Tag or Alt Image Attribute

Provide Image Alt Tag or Attribute for every picture you add to your website. Alt text tag will be displayed in place of an image if browser has trouble to loading it or user in slow network area. Most of cases visitors won’t see it, but search engine crawlers do. Alt text tag provides better image context/descriptions to search crawlers, helping them to index an image properly.

It is best practice to use keywords in your Alt tags but refrain from keyword stuffing. For ecommerce and product images, it is often a good idea to also add SKUs, ISBNs or model Number of Alt attributes.

4. Add Image Captions

Importance of captioning is growing day by day due to change in technology. It is a factual description of a visual element which helps to validate and authenticate your image. Captioning your images helps to your reader to understand a picture and interesting photographs can spark a reader's interest in a full text story. Captions contain vital factual information about what is going on in a photo, where and when the photo was taken etc. So an accurate caption may increase SEO of your image.

5. Choose The Right Image File Type

Choose right image file type is an important factor in image SEO. Images on the web come in many formats e.g JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, WebP, SVGs, BMP and many more. JPEGs (or JPGs), PNGs and GIFs are the widely used file format on web.

JPEGs images are smaller in size and will protect your site speed. This type of images use for blog post images, screenshots etc.

PNGs Images are larger in size and higher quality images. When image quality matters like icons and logos, use PNGs images.

Logos and other high resolution, computer generated graphics can typically also use the vector-based SVG file format.

Using other image formats on your site, especially GIFs are not recommended because they slow down your site speed.

6. Reduce The Image File Size

Image file size is very important in terms of image SEO. Image size has a direct effect on the speed of the site. The larger the image file size, the longer the page will take to load, and the smaller the image file size, the faster the site will load and the better performance. But the question arises that if you reduce the size of the image, what affect will it have on the image quality? Obviously, reducing the image file size will affect the quality.

Therefore, the image size should be kept as small as possible to minimize the impact on the image quality. No hard and fast rule for image files size but always try to use images fewer than 100kb.

There are many image compressor tools available online that can help us to reduce the size of our image file. You may search at Google and find image compressor tool according to your requirement.

7. Add Images To Your Sitemap

Add your images in sitemap, helps crawlers to better crawl your website and add in index. So include images in your sitemap or alternately, create a separate image sitemap to submit.

8. Use Responsive Images

Going responsive is the best way to make sure your website looks good on all device Desktops, mobiles, or tablets. Responsive images adjust itself according to the screen size without losing quality.

9. Use Right Image Size and Aspect Ratio

Choosing the best images for your website that look good is not enough. You also need to think about how they’ll fit with your website design. This means thinking about your image dimension as well .

Image size is simply the dimensions of your image like (300 x 200), (450 x 300) or (600 x 400) and Aspect ratio is the proportional relationship between its width and height. In our example our aspect ratio is 3:2. So, choose right image size and aspect so your website looks good.

Tip: Image size for blog should be 800px (width) x auto (height)

10. Use Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is an optimization technique that assists in loading only the required section and delays the remaining, until it is needed by the user. This technique can increase your website loading speed and especially useful for websites that have long pages.

Conclusion

I hope, after this article you will be able to optimize your images and get higher search engine ranking as well.

10 Tips For Image Optimization For Websites | Image SEO