If you are blogger or a content writer, if you are writing content for your blog then you must be using images in your content, which is a good practice because images brings your content to life. But did you know like content SEO, images optimization SEO is also important. An optimized images not only attracts visitors but also increases the visitor engagement time and your image also get featured on rich results which eventually attracts more visitors.
So, in this article we will talk about what is Image optimization SEO, and how to optimize it. We will cover the topic in following ways.
- What is image SEO?
- How does image SEO works?
- Do images help SEO?
- How do I make an image SEO friendly?
- Conclusion
What is Image SEO?
Image SEO is the process of optimizing the images used in the website, so that they can easily understand by the search engine.
Image SEO is the most common step, most easy step but still underestimated and avoided by most of the people. If image optimization is not done properly it can reduce the opportunity for your content to rank, gain links and attract the valuable traffic.
How does Image SEO works?
Like human eyes search engine can't see or understand the objects and people inside the images. For search engines the images are another queus of scripts and codes. To understand the image the search engine extract the information from the content, image title, file name, alt tags as well as captions and tries to understand the image in best possible way.
Do images help SEO?
Images makes your content more interesting and brings life to your content. It helps your reader to understand your content better. Optimized images not only attracts visitors it also increases the visitors engaging time to your contents which eventually improves the SEO.
How do I make an image SEO friendly?
Optimizing images for SEO is crucial if you want to make your website more accessible, attractive and increase the engaging to the contents. Here I have list down some image SEO best practices which you can do to improve your image SEO.
- Optimize the image title
- Do the Alt tags SEO
- Give captions to the image
- Resize the image
- Use unique images
- Use content relevant images
- Give image structured data
Optimize the image title
This first step is ignored by most of the people because people thinks nobody cares about the image file name. The image title usually taken by the file name only by the search engine. If you are using a Wordpress website then it shows option to change the file name but in case of other website before uploading you need to change the filename withe a appropriate keyword.
Do the Alt tags SEO
This is the most important step for image optimization for SEO, because normal people through visual can understand the image but not the search engine. To understand the image the search engine extract the information form the alt tags. Even if the image is not fully loaded may be due to glitch the search engine can understand the images through alt tags.
Give captions to the image
Captions are the texts which is given below the images. Well giving captions not directly impact the SEO but it can reduce the bounce rate, since it is visible to the visitors.
Resize the image
While choosing a featured images for your content, you need to keep a balance between the image resolution and file size of an image. An image with higher resolution will consume more space due to which the website loading time will increase which is not good for SEO.
Use unique images
Using unique images is as important as using unique content for SEO. Using stock photos is good but just think why the search engine will rank your article if the ranking website is using the same featured image which your are using. Now a days there are so many tools out there on the internet where you can design your image and customize them as you want.
Use content relevant images
Always use images which are relevant to the content because the page content helps the search engine to determine the page relevancy of an image. If the image is relevant to the content and well optimized then the search engine will help your image to rank at the image section on search engine.
Give image structured data
Google uses image structured data for recipes, videos and product images. Adding structure data to your webpage will helps the search engine to give your images as rich result which eventually attracts more visitors to the website.