Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vital part of any website’s success. But there are many ways to improve your site’s rankings, including optimizing your images so they’re easy for search engines to find and read. That way, when someone searches for something like “dogs in winter coats” or “red hair dye,” they’ll see your site at the top of their results—and more people will visit!
Use ALT tags.
ALT tags are another important element of SEO. They help search engines to index your image, which increases its visibility in SERPs. However, they should be unique and descriptive as well as less than 100 characters long. It’s also important that they’re present in the image code (i.e., when you upload an image from Shutterstock or another source).
In addition to these things, ALT text must also be visible on the page where it appears. If this isn’t possible for whatever reason—for example, if there are too many images on one page—you can use HTML code instead:
Optimize your images for mobile devices.
- Use responsive images. This means that your website will automatically adjust its layout to fit the screen size of any device that loads it, so you don’t have to worry about resizing images or having them look pixelated on different devices.
- Use the same file type for all devices. Don’t use a different image file type (like PNG) if it isn’t needed—and even if it is needed, opt instead for JPEG files with high compression ratios and large image dimensions in order to reduce load times and bandwidth usage on mobile networks (which can be expensive).
- Use the right size for each device’s screen resolution by selecting “Fit” rather than “maximize.” This will ensure that viewers see only as much content as possible without sacrificing quality or making navigation difficult; there’s no point in showing more text than necessary when reading an article on your phone!
Include descriptive filenames and captions.
- Include descriptive filenames and captions.
- The name of your image is the first thing people see when they view it, so it’s important to make sure you have an intuitive title that tells users what to expect from your image. This can be as simple as “Image 1″ or “Image 2″ (with no spaces), but if you want to go beyond this basic naming convention, try using descriptive words like “sweet baby carrots,” “a sunny day with friends,” or even just “a picture of my cat.”
- Don’t forget about search engines! If someone searches for related topics while looking at your site’s photos (for example: “carrots”), then their browser will show them only those images whose title or filename matches the terms in their query—and if those terms are too broad or unclearly expressed in the source text themselves, there’s little chance that these results will contain any useful information about what exactly these particular carrots look like!
Choose the right image file type.
When choosing a file type, the first step is to think about what you’re trying to accomplish. JPEGs are great for photos and photos of text, PNGs are good for images with transparent backgrounds, and GIFs are best suited for animations and logos/icons. SVG files may not be necessary if your image is just an icon or character—but they can help make your website look more professional by providing scalable vector graphics that work well on all devices (including mobile).
Add image sitemaps.
Sitemaps are an important part of Google’s indexing process, and you can use them to improve the crawl ability of your website. They’re useful for showing Google what images on your site are most relevant for users and therefore worth prioritizing in search results. To create one, first, open up Screaming Frog (it’s a free tool), then click “Create Web Site Map” or “Add Sitemap” from the drop-down menu at the top left corner of the screen.
Once you’ve created an XML file using Screaming Frog, upload it into Google Search Console under “SiteMaps.” If you don’t have time to do this yourself but want more control over how much information gets crawled by Googlebot (or robots crawling other websites), create a separate sitemap index file manually with another tool like SumoMe SEO’s SEO Spider Toolkit ($149) by following these steps:
Compress images.
This is one of the most important steps to take when you’re optimizing your images for SEO and mobile devices. The smaller an image is, the less data it uses up on a page and therefore allows Google’s indexing engine to more quickly find what you’re talking about. It also looks better in tweets, which means that if someone shares this article on Twitter or Facebook, they’ll notice how much better it looks than other articles they’ve seen before.
Use tools like TinyPNG or JPEGmini that can compress your images as much as possible while still maintaining quality—and don’t overdo it with compression! Too much compression will result in blurry images that aren’t readable at all; instead, use something like JpegMini (free) which has options for reducing file size without sacrificing quality too much
Boost site speed with Lazy Loading.
Lazy loading is a technique that only loads images when the user scrolls over them, which can improve performance by reducing the number of images that need to be downloaded. It’s a great solution for sites where you want to see all your images on one page (like an album or gallery).
Lazy loading can be done with Javascript or CSS, but we recommend using Javascript because it’s easier for small businesses who don’t have much time and/or technical knowledge. You just need to add some code to your HTML file:
Know how to use Schema Markup for images.
Schema markup is a set of attributes that you can add to your images in order to improve their SEO. It’s a way for search engines to understand the content of an image and how it relates to other images on the same page or different pages.
For example, if you have an image of two people who are holding hands and smiling at each other, then this could be described as “Human Interaction” by Schema Markup. This would tell Google that there was some sort of interaction between these two people (such as them being friends or family members), which helps Google understand what kind of information they’re trying to find in your website’s content: human interactions!
Minimize bounce rates with appropriate images.
Images should be relevant to the text, page, site, and user. They should also be relevant to the search query being searched.
Make sure that you’re not using images that are too large or small for what they represent in your content. This can cause users to bounce from your website because they’re unable to view all of the information contained within them at once; this could negatively affect their experience with your site as well as how likely they’ll come back again in the future!
Measure performance with Google Analytics.
To measure performance, you need to use Google Analytics. You can access this tool at analytics.google.com/help/analytics-reporting-best-practices or by using the tracking code: /analytics/.
To start collecting data from your site’s traffic, install the free version of Google Analytics on your website so that it’s tracking visitors as they arrive and leave your site; then add a tracking tag to each page where you want to track which pages were most popular with visitors from search engines like Bing and Yahoo! (or whatever engine is sending you traffic). After that, go into Performance Tracking in Google Analytics by clicking on “View all campaigns” under All Campaigns in the left sidebar menu bar; click “Create campaign”—it’ll ask if there are any filters set up yet—and select “New filter” from the dropdown menu; fill out its form with information about what kind of content was found on each particular page by using phrases such as “product category” or “product name” along with keywords like “shoes” and how many times per day those keywords appear within an hour window (for example 12 pm-2 pm every day), then save it as a new filter by clicking Save Changes button located at the top right corner near title bar.*
SEO-friendly images can boost your traffic and conversions.
The main reason for this is that search engines use the visual content on a page to determine its relevance to what you’re looking for. Images are an integral part of any page, so they play an important role in determining rankings on Google. This can be especially true if you have a lot of image-heavy content on your site, like a blog or e-commerce store.
So what does all this mean? If you use high-quality images on your website then it will help improve your overall performance in search engines like Google (and other top results) by making the site look more professional and relevant than those without them!
Conclusion
We hope we’ve covered all the basics of SEO-friendly image optimization, and that you now feel confident in your ability to create high-converting images that boost your rankings. After all, it’s not as hard as you think! Don’t forget about your caption and description—they play a huge part in getting people on board with what you have to say. And finally, remember that if there’s anything else we missed or forgot (or maybe even if there isn’t), please let us know in the comments below 🙂 Thanks for reading!
