Optimising your Images for SEO

Users are very visual. They engage more when there are unique, high-resolution images on a website.

Images also make text more attractive and memorable. In fact, posts with images get read 94% more. The same goes for social media posts. So always make sure to utilize them to attract visitors to browse your site longer and boost engagement.

Why optimizing images is good for your website

A significant element of your on page SEO strategy if you want your page to rank is to optimize the images you’re going to use.

Search engines recognize images in terms of its pixels but it can’t really assess what your image is about if you don’t optimize it. We have to give search engines a clue what the image is aside from using HTML tags.

Image optimization will help your image appear in image searches and your page to rank high. This is especially important if your business deals with products and services that depend on images and visuals.

Simple ways you can do to optimize your images

You can get the most out of your images by optimizing them for SEO. Not only will your website ranking improve if you do, the images themselves will rank and can bring extra traffic to your site.

  • Label your images properly to keep it searchable and to provide crawlers with specific information. It should be short, descriptive and relevant to the image itself, the keyword, and the page where it’s going to be uploaded. Do this before uploading it to the website.
  • Use image-specific keywords. Keyword research and optimization has diversified to include videos, PDFs and images, not just web pages. To fine-tune the keywords to use with what consumers are searching for, use image keyword research tools like Google Insights for Search.
  • Give the image a unique title and alt tag. Search engines can’t “read” images. Alt tags are the text alternative you provide search engines so your image can be rendered properly. Your title and alt tag should be a bit different from each other and again, must be relevant to the image, keyword or page content.
  • Reduce the file size of your images. Large, high-resolution images are great, but it can slow down your page load speed which is bad for SEO. To get around this, what you can do is reduce the file size of the image with image compression tools.

We recommend using https://wordpress.org/plugins/imsanity/  and https://tinypng.com/. They keep the quality of the image intact while using as little data as possible so the image will load fast.

Want to boost your image and on-page ranking? Send us an email at [email protected] and we’ll help you optimize your images.