Image SEO the ultimate guide to image seo

Image SEO: Get 11 Image Optimization Tips To 10x Your website Organic Traffic.

Table of Contents

Introduction to Image SEO:

Image SEO is an important part of any website. Optimizing your images for SEO can improve your website’s visibility and ranking. This guide will give you an overview of image SEO and what it is. I will also give you a complete guide on how to do image SEO for better organic traffic and better search engine visibility.

Images make up the bigger part of any website and they play an important role in a website’s beauty and user experience. Without visual content, a webpage may look boring and unappealing.

But adding images to your website can add a lot of weight to your website, and as a result, it will slow down your website. That being said, it is important to understand how images work and how they can be used to improve your website visibility, organic traffic, and user experience.

What is image optimization in SEO?

So the first question to ask is what is image SEO? Image SEO is the process of optimizing images for SEO and making them compliant with google’s image SEO guidelines.

For example:

1.      writing SEO friendly alt tags

2.     Selecting the right image size

3.     Selecting the right image format

4.     Reducing the size of your images

5.     Creating an image site map and submitting it to search engines.

Properly SEO-optimized images can help search engines understand the context of your images and can help improve your website rankings.

Search engines use bots to crawl websites and analyze the images on the website to determine what type of content is available on the website, so providing the proper alternative tags to your images, can help search engines understand the images on your website and can help improve your website visibility.

How important are images for SEO?

First, images make the bigger of any website, having no visual content on your website makes it boring and unpleasant,

The second google uses images to understand the context of your website and rank images from your website in the google image search results. From where your website can get a significant amount of organic traffic which may turn into paying customers in the long run,

Just have a quick look at this image from one of the ecommerce SEO client’s google search console.

Image SEO: Organic traffic from google image search to a website

 

How to do image SEO? Google image SEO tips and best practices.

Image SEO is very easy if you have the right and thoroughly tested image SEO tips. I am sharing eleven Image SEO tips or best practices that can boost the visibility and organic traffic to your website.

Write SEO-optimized image alt tags. (SEO Image alt tag example)

 

Image alt-tag is an alternative text snippet that appears with the image. The aim of an image alt-tag ( alternative text) is to describe the image, so that search engines can understand the context of an image. it also helps visually impaired users who use screen readers when browsing.

So when writing the image alt-tag, try to be natural as if you are talking to a human, not a bot. So try to provide a context just as shown in the example below.

Here is an example of an SEO image alt tag in HTM

<img src=”puppy.jpg” alt=”A golden retriever puppy” />

TIP: if you are using WordPress or other CMS then you don’t need to code like this, instead you only need to provide alt-text to the plugin you use, and it will write the code for you.

Select the right image format.

Selecting the right image format is way more important. You need to know which file formats Google recommends or are acceptable to search engines.

For example, Google recommends the following image file formats to be used on your website.

  1. BMP.
  2. GIF.
  3. JPEG.
  4. PNG.
  5. WebP.
  6. SVG.

Compress your website images.

As we know images make up most of our website, while on the other side, images do add load to your website and these image takes a lot of time to load, So as a result, your website will take too much time to load.

So website loading time is a crucial ranking factor, to avoid this, you will need to reduce the size of all the images on your website.

TIP: try reducing the size of your website images from 10KB to 150KB, the smaller your image is, the faster it will load.

So how to reduce the image size of your website images?

As doing this task will waste lots of your precious time. Say you are going to resize 1000 images. But for this, I use WP smush, I would recommend it to you as well, as this WordPress plugin automatically finds out the images that need resizing, provides CDN, and many more things.

WP smush plugin for image size reducing

Be unique with your images

Having unique content is highly important when it comes to SEO, google strictly recommends not using duplicate content or plagiarized content. On another side, you, as a business owner also want to provide branded content. Right.

So when choosing images, make sure you are creating your own visuals, whether in the form of real photos or web graphics. You need to be unique.

Use your target keyword in the image alt tag when possible.

This is one of my favorite on-page SEO tricks, Always try using your target keyword variation in the image alt tag.

Repeat: I am saying “keywords variations”, so keep in mind that you are very natural when writing the image alt tags.

Using your target keywords variations will help your web page rank for multiple keywords as well as help search engines to understand the content on your webpage.

Use royalty-free images

As we discussed, you must know copyright in SEO. so sometimes you will need to take help with the existing images on the web and may use tools like

Pixels

Pixbay

Gettyimages

So just make sure, you are using royalty-free images or in other words free images.

If you use someone else’s images, you may face the “ REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH” conflict. What happens in the reverse image search tactic?

Reverse image search

In fact, link builders, do a quick search with their image in hand, reach out to all those webmasters who use their image, and then demand a backlink in exchange, or you will have to take it down. So be careful.

Create Proper Image File Names

File names provide strong signals to google about the subject matter of an image, here is how google wants you to write image names. See the example.

Likewise, the filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG. If you localize your images, make sure you translate the filenames, too.

So make sure your image file names are descriptive and human-friendly.

Add structured data

Structured data play an important role in organic click-through rate and organic clicks. You can also include structured data in your images. As Google says, if you have added structured data to your images, they can appear in the google image search

Structured data gives users highly relevant information and can truly bring targeted organic traffic to your website. Google supports structured data for the following types.

  • Products
  • Videos
  • Recipe
  •  

Keep your page loading speed in mind.

Like I said at the start of this article, loading time is a very crucial ranking factor in SEO, and it the chances improve further if you use images on your website.

So when using images on your website, make sure their size is reduced and are compliant with the latest image optimization practices

In addition, you can use google’s page speed insights tool to test your webpage speed.

Add good-quality photos

In SEO, you have to produce people-first content, and using high-quality images is one of those on-page SEO elements. Users love a clear image as compared to a blurry one.

So make sure your images are super clear, and relevant to the topic’s main theme or subject in discussion.

Create an image sitemap

A site map is a file that lists all the important elements of your website in an organized way and presents this information to the search engines so they can easily find out the content on the website.

A site map may include pages, posts, videos, and images of your website.

So it is a good practice to use an image site map when it comes to image SEO optimization.

If you are using WordPress, you can use plugins to generate sitemaps for different elements on your website. The plugins you can use include

  • Yoast SEO
  • RankMath
  • All-in-one on SEO.

And the list goes on and on, so try choosing one that satisfies your needs and budget well.

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