According to Live Internet statistics, there are 3.5 billion Google searches made every day. And in 2018 Google images contributed 22.6% of all internet searches.
Optimizing your site image will help with your site UX, load time, and increase your site ranking in ordinary SERP and image search.
The SEO image is very important if you are an e-commerce site, because you will most likely have hundreds of images, and if not optimized correctly, you will lose a lot of traffic and potential rankings.
Image optimization will play a greater role in searching with visual search progress, by being able to use images to buy products for example.
Google and Bing are used for visual searches, Google has a Google and Bing lens they have a visual search.
If the image on your website is not properly marked and optimized, it is time to focus your efforts on aspects of your site’s SEO.
Here are six tips on what you can do to help with your site’s image optimization + three bonus tips.1
1. Create a customized image file name
This is where your image is SEO start, with the image file name. When you name your image file name, you want to use the descriptive file name which also contains the right keywords for the image.
The reason for this is that your image file name will be used to help Google understand what the subject matter is an image.
It is important to remember that your image file name is what will tell Google and other search engines about what your image is.
For example, typical let’s take the file name this image will look like “IMG-1234” or something similar.
As you can imagine, the image file name will not help much for users or Google because no one will look for it, and therefore as the file name does not provide information to Google.
Now let’s look at this picture from GSC or Google Search Console for example.
You can mention “GSC” or “Google-Search-Console” but if you get more descriptive and call it “Google-Search-Console-Traffic-Spike” you will help users and search engines to better understand the image.
Now, this does not mean you can return to the keyword days in your image file name. Doing it will definitely make you punished and or even banned from Google.
Save your file name descriptive and direct and you will be in front of the game.
Remember, there is no need for a lot of effort to change the name of the image to something a little more descriptive unless you have an e-commerce site with hundreds or thousands of products, then it will take place so it is worth it and something that will help with the ranking of your site on long-term internet.
2. Write a Seo-friendly Alt image text
Alt-text is important for your site’s image because that’s what you can use to help provide a better image context which in turn will help search engines index your image correctly.
This will also appear if something is wrong with your image and fails to load.
Google even mentions the text value of Alt in the image, saying that the ALT text gives them useful information about images that they can use to help determine the best images to restore user requests.
3. Image file size
The size of the image file plays an important role in how your site will load for users and search engines. Having a large image (file size) on your site can cause your site to load very slowly.
With page speed it becomes a ranking factor, it’s even more important than before to make sure your site contains in seconds.
The image of your site can be a big file and it doesn’t help when it comes to the user experience.
This is where optimizing the size of the site image file plays a big role because all large file sizes can directly affect your rank in search SERP and images, especially if you have large e-commerce sites with hundreds or even thousands of images.
You can’t reduce the size of your image file in a haphazard manner, this is something that needs to be done correctly, if not, you will end up with a picture that looks low.
The functionality of the ‘Save for Web’ Adobe Photoshop offers one of the best options for you to reduce image file size without affecting image quality.
If you don’t have access to Adobe Photoshop, there are many other great online tools that you can use for free to make this change. Tinyjpeg is a great tool and so google compression tools themselves.
Squoosh allows you to preview your image quality changes when you start making changes to your image.
You only need to drag and lower your image into the web application and you are ready to make adjustments to the size of your image file.
As you can see with a picture of the Las Vegas mark above, on the left side is the size of the new file reduced by 27% smaller than the original on the right. Can you find quality differences?
After you make all changes to your image file size, you can then test your site’s page speed with one of the many tools available online.
There are many tools that you can use to test the speed of your sites, such as webpagetest.org or Pingdom.
Google has some great tools that you can use for free to check the speed of the site, lighthouse, hoe page speed, and their page speed tools test my site.
Loading time is important for UX and SEO, so make sure you reduce the size of your site’s image file to ensure that you have a fast loading site.
This tweak to your site will pay in the long term and worth a little effort needed to make changes.
4. Select the best image file type
Three types of main image files are the most common ones that you can use on your site, they are JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
Each has pros and cons. JPEG tends to be the best choice because this is a format that provides the best option to maintain image quality when compressed or changed in size.
PNG is often used for logos because it gives you the ability to make small images with high-quality resolution.
You must be careful because the higher quality display will produce a larger file size, which can cause problems with the performance of your page.
GIF is similar to PNG files because they are smaller images, they should not be used in product photos or Lager images.
JPEG is the best option format because it makes a small file size without losing the image quality and it is also supported universally.
5. Create a picture sitemap
Just like the sitemap that you will make for all pages on your site, create a picture sitemap or add your image to your current sitemap, it will help Google to find your site’s image, increase the likelihood that your image will be displayed in your image search results and produce More site traffic.
It is important for you to add your site’s image to a sitemap and especially important if you run an e-commerce business and want all your product images to be indexed.
You can add your image to the existing sitemap or create a new sitemap for your image. The main idea is that you want all your images somewhere on your site map.
Putting your image in a sitemap increases the opportunity for search engine crawling and indexing your image which can then generate more site traffic.
There are many different tools that you can use to help produce your site sitemap, both are a good starting point, but don’t hesitate to choose the most suitable for your needs.
Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is one of my entry tools in my Arsenal SEO, this is a good desktop software that offers a variety of SEO tools.
It is also free to use including producing sitemaps as long as your website has less than 500 pages. For you with a larger website, you have to update the paid version.
Yoast: Yoast is an SEO plugin that must be owned if you run WordPress, they make it very simple to make a sitemap, just by linking the switch.
6. Open a chart and twitter card
By using open Facebook graphics and Twitter cards on your site, you will ensure that your site’s content can be more clicked, can be shared, and visible on social media.
Facebook has a comprehensive list of tags that you can use on your site, but I find that this is what you want to focus on.
OG: title
OG: URL.
OG: Image.
OG: Type.
OG: Description
You will want to pay special attention to OG: picture tag because this is the most important open graphic tag because it occupies the most social feed real estate.
The Twitter card works the same way that Facebook’s open chart tag works.
Using the tag ‘Summary card with a large image tag is the one you want to focus on when it comes to the image.
After your tag in place on your site, you can test it to make sure they work as expected and ready to share.
You can use these tools to check your site’s OG tags:
Facebook Share Debugger
Twitter card validator
LinkedIn Post Inspector.
If you take the time to add HTML code to your site for the open chart and Twitter card, you can guarantee that the image will appear on the social platform every time your link is shared.
Conclusion
In this blog you learn about the Image SEO: Best practices and tips for optimization.
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