Image SEO: 10 Tips To Boost Your Web Images

By Maulik Patel

18 Sep 2023

Entering the world of web images, one quickly realizes that pictures are more than just photos. They tell stories and express feelings in a single glimpse. In such a digital world, mastering Image SEO gives you the upper hand. Image SEO is about making websites more visible and attracting organic traffic. This post explores ten tips to supercharge the image SEO strategy. Learn how to make the website more visible and attract more visitors by optimising the images.

What is Image SEO?

Image SEO is an important aspect of online presence today. It involves various factors that impact how images perform on websites.

Image optimisation works on the type of image you use, its size, and how fast it loads. It’s about using alt text and keywords in the image file names to help search engines understand and rank the images.

It makes images on the website search engine-friendly while keeping them visually appealing for people.

Why Are Images So Important?

In today’s digital world, images hold a special place in an online experience. According to SEMrush, about 22.6% of all online searches occur on Google Images, and there are 3.5 billion Google searches daily, as per Internet Live Stats.

Images are essential in the digital journey. To make the most of them, understanding image optimisation is important. They have a special ability to boost a website’s visibility and search engine rankings.

Both Google and Bing rely on images for their visual search features. Images are like Google’s handy tool. Google Lens, or Bing’s visual search, can make searching visually easier.

10 Tips To Improve The Image SEO:

Choosing The Right Format:

There are three main image format options available: PNG, JPEG, and the newcomer, WebP.

PNG is for images with clear backgrounds, like logos or icons. It keeps things sharp and crisp.
JPEG is the go-to format for photos. It keeps them looking good while making the file size smaller.
WebP is a newer format, which is a mix of the two. It offers good quality with smaller file sizes.

Getting this choice right can make any website faster and more appealing to visitors. By understanding these image formats, you’re on the way to mastering image SEO and making your online presence shine.

Compressing The Images:

Large images can make a website heavy. Images make up about 21% of a webpage’s weight, affecting the website’s loading speed. To simplify this process, there’s TingPNG, a helpful tool with a WordPress plugin that makes image compression smooth. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is a navigation system that helps you make the site faster and more user-friendly.

Creating Original Images:

In the world of image SEO, being original is highly important. It’s like giving your online presence a unique and memorable identity that people will love and remember.

Original images catch the eye and make any website special. They are the special ingredient that sets the dish apart. Creating unique images isn’t just a creative touch; it’s a smart SEO move. It helps the website look great and perform well in search engines.

Avoiding Copyright:

Always stay cautious while sharing pictures online to avoid any legal troubles. Some recent cases, like the Postal Service paying $3.5 million and Skechers getting sued for $2.5 million, show how important it is to respect copyrights when using images.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is like the rulebook. If you break any copyright rules, you might get a warning notice from the DMCA.

But don’t worry! There are ways to stay safe while optimising images for SEO. Google Images can help you find images that you’re allowed to use.

Writing SEO-friendly Alt text:

Alt text is like captions for search engines. They help search engines understand what the images are all about. Alt texts provide the images with a roadmap to navigate through the visual content. Paying attention to Alt tags isn’t just about images; it’s also a smart move for improving the overall SEO strategy.

When you add SEO-friendly Alt text to the images, you’re not just making them more accessible but also giving the website a boost in the digital world. It’s like speaking the language that both search engines and people understand, making the content more visible and engaging.

Optimising Page Title And Description:

Everything on the webpage matters when it comes to SEO for images. It’s like arranging the products neatly on shelves, making them easy to find. The page title, description, and other elements work like signposts guiding users to the images.

Google pays attention to these signs too. They use the page’s title and description to figure out what the images are all about. When you optimise the page structure and descriptions, it’s like setting up a welcoming store with clear labels.

You’re not just making the images look good; you’re also helping Google understand them better, which can boost the image’s visibility online.

Define The Dimensions:

In the world of digital marketing, understanding image optimisation SEO is crucial. To improve your online presence, you must understand the key concept of defining image dimensions in the website’s source code.

This is important for those who use technologies like AMP or PWAs. It means telling web browsers the exact size of the images before they load the CSS, speeding up the webpage.

These defined image dimensions also help prevent a problem called Cumulative Layout Shift, which can mess up the Core Web Vitals optimisation efforts.

Specifying image dimensions is like giving the website a turbo boost. It makes the website faster, more user-friendly, and more search engine-friendly. Mastering this can help your online presence take off!

Make Images Mobile-Friendly:

Mobile-friendly images adapt easily to different screen sizes, be it a desktop computer or a mobile device.

This adaptability not only makes user engagement better but also scores brownie points with search engines. Ensuring the image attributes are formatted correctly is important while making the images mobile-friendly.

This approach shows that you care about providing a great user experience across all devices, strengthening your position in the competitive field of SEO for images.

Add Images To Sitemaps:

Including mages in the sitemap ensures that the visual content gets noticed by search engines. This not only improves image SEO but also makes it easier for people to find the website.

For those using WordPress and Yoast, the plugins offer a user-friendly solution for this task. They simplify the process of adding images to the sitemap.

For anyone looking to uplift their website’s image SEO, this is an easy step that gives the pictures a better chance to shine online and contribute to the site’s success.

Add Structured Data:

Adding structured data is a practical tip based on image optimisation best practices. This can give the website a significant boost. Structured data means providing a clear roadmap to search engines about the images. It helps search engines understand what the images are about, making them more visible in search results.

Similarly, image alt text for SEO is an essential part of structured data. Alt text adds a helpful description to the images, ensuring they make sense to both search engines and visitors. It’s an easy yet powerful way to enhance the image SEO efforts and secure the website’s place in the future of SEO.

Conclusion:

From picking the right image format to using friendly image descriptions, they’re all about making the website shine. And if you ever need expert help, our SEO services in Perth are there for you. Simply follow these tips and see your online presence reach an all-time high!