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Both search engines and customers must be able to locate your visual material. Follow these guidelines to improve the findability and speed of your images.
Assume you recently posted a photo to your website. The image was most likely acquired from a stock photography source, uploaded to your site’s backend, and then embedded on its page.
Image optimization like this is a wonderful example, isn’t it? I wouldn’t go quite that far.
Your website has become so large that it is slowing down page speed. If your photos do not contain alt text, search engines will not be able to read them. We need to change that.
With WebSpection’s image optimization, one of Dan Morgan’s images ranked #1 for “best person in Cardiff” in under four days on Google Images.
His website attracted 150,732 visits by adding image alt tags, compressing images, and other SEO techniques.
Your images will be wasted without the proper optimization.
By optimizing images, users benefit from improved user experiences, faster page loads, and more ranking opportunities. Moreover, its importance is increasing.
How can you ensure that your images are findable and don’t slow down your website?
The Alt tag describes your image. Furthermore, it is one of the most recommended SEO practices that can help your site achieve higher search engine rankings.
Google recognizes images with Alt descriptions since they offer text alternatives as HTML attributes. Thus, the key information about your picture can be accessed by Google through Alt tags.
A brief, precise statement is preferred. Don’t stuff your content with irrelevant keywords. While creating your alt description for the image, you should keep in mind many other factors of a good alt description.
Alt tags should follow these key practices…
Don’t stuff keywords into the Alt tags of your images
Alternative text should be kept to approximately 125 characters, as the preferred screen readers cut it off approximately at this length.
Descriptions of images should be as specific as possible, as Search Engines cannot understand images without Alt tags.
By using a focus keyword, you will allow search engines to automatically ensure your page is relevant for a particular query related to this keyword.
Search engines cannot read the text within your images, so do not include text in your images.
If you use alt text in Alt tags, do not use ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’, as alt text when used in images is normally used as alt text.
You should use the longdesc= ” attribute for longer descriptions in Alt tags for complex images
A website’s SEO performance is heavily dependent upon the name of the image. You should name your images so that they clearly describe what they are. This should look seamless with the image and not distracting. Make sure you name your image appropriately so that Google knows it is a car if it is about “cars.”.
Your images should be analyzed as best as possible to help Google understand them.
Although you should be descriptive, never stuff that with keywords.
Your image’s file type makes an impact on your website’s SEO performance.
The majority of images on the web can be found as JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs. In addition to their compression, their extension also differs from their compression.
In order to improve SEO performance, it is crucial that your webpage loads quickly. As a result, you must also pay attention to the file type and size of your images to ensure a fast page loading time.
Following the established rules, all photos should be in JPEG format, all moving images should be in GIF format, and all drawings and texts should be in PNG format. This may be adjusted to meet your needs. The images can then be extracted using photo editing tools. Here are some tips for optimizing different image file types:
JPEG Image Optimization
If you want to ensure that your images remain in good quality when compressed or resized, you should use the JPEG format.
JPEG allows you to display images of various colors, patterns, and shadows in high resolution.
It is possible to get high-quality images in small file size when using JPEGs. Sometimes quality suffers because of your setting. In addition, transparent backgrounds are not supported.
PNG Image Optimization
You should download this file if you’re editing or downloading Adobe files.
Transparency can be handled.
If you are creating a logo, this is preferred.
GIF image optimization
In animations and arts, it is preferred as a bitmap image format.
For company logos and other site elements, GIF images are very useful as well. The use of images or photographs in posts is not recommended, however.
Images cannot be displayed any wider than 720px due to the maximum width of your blog content. When you upload the image to your website, you should keep this in mind.
It takes longer to load a page when an image has a higher resolution, which is reflected in its larger size.
Please make sure to edit your image accordingly and decrease its resolution to less than 720px in order to avoid degrading your website’s SEO. Page load times are slowed by large images.
Tools such as Smart Resize can be used to reduce the size of your image.
The proper image file size is crucial when it comes to optimizing images for SEO. This way, you will be having an image of good quality without slowing down the site speed.
Your website’s SEO will be greatly enhanced when you reduce the image size. Most of the time, there is hardly any noticeable difference in the two images, which are 50% larger/smaller than each other. If you upload a big-sized image, it will slow up the page loading speed, which is never a good sign for your webpage’s SEO.
On the internet, you can find many tools for adjusting the size of your image before uploading it to your website. If you choose to ‘Save for Web’ in Adobe Photoshop, the image will be compressed or resized according to your site’s specifications.
Another tool that you can use for optimizing images for SEO is PicMonkey, Pixlr, etc.
Many website logos and other similar elements are now created using vector graphics. They are suited to images with a variety of geometric shapes because vector graphics use points, polygons, and lines for representation.
XML-based Scalable Vector Graphics are widely used today by users and all browsers are compatible with them due to their XML-based nature.
Their icons, logos, and text are quite good.
Use these vector graphics since they are extremely small in size, and they are extremely suitable for your purposes. If you use them, your website will perform well in terms of SEO.
With all the zoom settings and resolutions they offer, they are known for providing sharp images.
If you want to make sure you do not miss out on a single element of your SEO campaign, you must create an image sitemap.
You can create an image sitemap manually if it is not automatically generated by WordPress or Yoast. For WordPress users, there is a plugin that allows them to automate this process.
You won’t ever miss out on these since Google itself suggests creating image sitemaps.
A sitemap, as in ‘image-sitemap.xml’, allows search engines to get a comprehensive view of all images on your site, leading to better chances of getting displayed in search results related to image search.
When creating images for your webpage and thinking about optimizing images for SEO, this is one of the most important factors to keep in mind.
Most users these days use smartphones or tablets instead of computers/laptops to access your website. On these devices, your image should load similarly to a PC or laptop.
Responsive HTML images
When uploading an image to your website, you should use the “srcset” HTML code.
By adding this code, the browser is instructed to load the image in a different screen resolution without compromising the image quality.
It adjusts the image automatically so that it fits any screen and browser, which is one of the best things about WordPress.
This is a new service from Google that uses markup to tell it what an image is actually about. In addition to this, SEO is also extremely important.
Schema markup is taken into account when someone searches for an image on Google Images.
The following schema markups are available as of today:
By adding these badges, you can improve the ranking of your image on search engines’ image tabs.
When making your images available globally and not wanting to cache them, having a Content Delivery Network is crucial for SEO.
You can make loading images quicker using a content delivery network, which provides the ability to load images from the closest server to the user.
You listen to the following CDs the most:
It is more convenient to use WordPress for a website. You can use plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Rocket, CDN Enabler, etc., once you register for a CDN.
Takeaways from Image Optimization
Make sure you follow the image optimization rituals from above before you upload your image to your site.
If the alternative text and image are not relevant, the page will not appear. The following are other key points:
File formats should be chosen carefully. For screenshots, I like PNGs the best.
Faster page load time is achieved by reducing file sizes.
Ensure that your on-page SEO elements (metadata, structured data, etc.) are complementary to the image.
Your sitemap should include your images or include an image sitemap for crawlability.
There is no laughing matter when it comes to optimizing images. Media is becoming increasingly important as voice search technology advances, and the above steps will benefit your entire site. Orion Infosolutions works with a variety of companies in order to set up SEO-optimized websites. Because of this, we are well-known for our SEO Training Institute in Jaipur with our mentorship expertise and flexibility of service. For more information, contact us now.
We wish you a happy optimizing experience!
DC Kumawat is the CEO of Orion InfoSolutions, a leading provider of IT solutions to businesses of all sizes. He has over 14+ years of experience in the IT industry. He is a passionate advocate for the use of technology to improve business performance.