Images make your content more accessible, attractive, and engaging to all users. You should understand the basics of image optimization as they give your content the best opportunity to succeed with SEO.
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is the process that involves creating and delivering high images in the ideal format, size, and resolution for increasing user engagement. It also consists of labeling images with Metadata so the search engine crawlers can read them and understand the page context. However, you can reach out to the best SEO consultant Singapore to know more about image optimization.
According to the HTTP archive in 2018, the images made up 21% of the average total weight of the web page. The image size and the complexity impact the performance of the site to a great extent. You can also reduce the size of the images without compromising on the quality, the page load time, and the overall user experience. It can also have a very positive impact on search engine rankings, and it also improves further customer engagement, customer retention, and conversions.
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Following are the ways to improve your website SEO using images-
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Resize your images.
When it comes to user experience, page speed is very crucial. It is easy to accidentally slow down your page if you ignore the file size. Most smartphones take photos that are at least 4032 pixels by 3024 pixels. If the maximum image width on the website is 600 pixels, that particular image is far larger than it needs to be and can also slow down your site. To avoid the issues, you should resize the images to fully display the required dimensions before uploading.
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Compress image.
Resizing the images is not the only way to reduce their file size. You can also compress your images, and it also helps you decrease the page load time. Compressing an image means minimizing the file size without compromising on the quality to an unacceptable degree.
The main goal is to minimize the redundancy in the image data for faster loading speeds.
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Scale your images to work with your website.
Proper image size is essential, and it will vary depending on your CMs and the format of the page on which you are uploading the image. Images with more pixels will have more significant file sizes, which means that the surest way to ensure that you are using the proper image size is to get a handle on your site’s optimal image size and crop images before you upload them.
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Create original image content.
The stock photos are elementary to size, and most of the images you will download from any vendor will come in sizes that are friendly to most sites. However, the stock photos are not always as effective as the original. The curated graphs or the high-quality shots of your product in action are the kinds of images that get shared on social media.
Unique and compelling images are necessary to make your page original and valuable for the user. When the experts at Google are asked for a prescription for solid SEO or for a response to a particular shift in Google’s algorithm, you should create pages that are, above all, valuable for your audience. It means using images to help the users get the best experience from your pages.
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Use titles, captions, and alt text liberally.
When the search engine determines which images to return for an image query, it can access a limited amount of information. For image SEO, it means you need to give the search engine all the information you can about your image in the space you have been allotted. The following are the primary places to do this-
- Alt text.
It is helpful from a user experience standpoint for people using screen readers.
However, in terms of ranking, alt text means by which Google understands what your image is. You should include the target keyword of the page which might apply to a specific image.
- Captions.
Google is the search engine that extracts information about the subject matter of that particular image.
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Ensure seamless social sharing.
Open graph tags are the tags which are within your page’s HTML that ensure when someone shares that page on Facebook or Twitter. This is huge if you want your images to gain steam on social media and drive traffic and strong signals back to your site.
You can search for all these elements in your source code and you can also try mock posting your page on social media platforms. Implementing open graph tags will depend on your CMS.
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Give lazy loading a try.
Lazy loading can go a very long way by increasing the page speed by not loading below-the-fold images until your user scrolls down to them. Google is the search engine that endorses lazy loading in Pagespeed insights. You can also run into this recommendation when you are running a page speed analysis on your own site.
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Know your keywords and keyword phrases.
You should do your research just as you would optimize the rest of your website. You should also know the search terms people use to find you online. If you are unsure of the keywords, it is time to do some research. You should use Google’s Keyword Planner for discovering what people are searching for that relates to your business.
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Follow best practices for naming images for SEO.
Search crawlers analyze image filenames and it means your image filenames should accurately describe their content. If a certain keyword is relevant to the image, you should include it in the file name. You should not use random keywords with the hope of improving your rankings for image SEO.
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Include images in sitemaps.
Search engines cannot get information from visuals, and you need to put many clues about what exactly they contain. Google is the search engine that recommends creating image sitemaps as a best practice for publishing images.