The process of image optimization has become crucial for companies that are searching for SEO. To compete against other brands on rankings, you must ensure your images are easily loaded and relevant.
Search engines also focus on how well your images are optimized for ranking your website. The easier you make it for the search engines and visitors, the higher you will be ranked.
Let's look at a few tips on optimizing your images for your website.
20 Proven Tips for Image Optimization and SEO
Awareness of Usage and Copyright Issues
The most important thing you must remember when adding images is usage rights and licenses. Images are broadly classified into two groups - free-to-use and copyrighted content.
Like its namesake, free-to-use images can be used free of royalties. Sometimes, even free-to-use images are not free for commercial use.
Copyrighted content cannot be used without the permission of the author. These images either have to be bought, or you need to seek the author's permission before you put them on collateral. It is one of the most important things to be aware of when using images.
Even bigger companies have copyright problems, which can negatively affect the brand.
1. Awareness of Usage and Copyright Issues
The most important thing you must remember when adding images is usage rights and licenses. Images are broadly classified into two groups - free-to-use and copyrighted content.
Like its namesake, free-to-use images can be used free of royalties. Sometimes, even free-to-use images are not free for commercial use.
Copyrighted content cannot be used without the permission of the author. These images either have to be bought, or you need to seek the author's permission before you put them on collateral. It is one of the most important things to be aware of when using images.
Even bigger companies have copyright problems, which can negatively affect the brand.
2. Use Unique Images for Branding
Something more subtle when branding is the choice of images you use in your marketing.
Images are one of the most used content platforms for brands today. Users tend to associate the images a brand uses with their values. This means businesses today must be much more demanding of their marketing images.
The bottom line for every brand is that it needs to stand apart from its competitors. One of the easiest ways they can do this is by selecting unique images for their brand.
Adopting a particular style of imagery can improve brand recall and get more traction from your customers. Focus on being as creative as possible while adhering to your brand values.
3. Use Descriptive Alt Text for Images
Alt text is a powerful factor in improving your SEO potential when using images. Alt text is what search engines use to understand what the image is. It cannot parse images, so you need to describe what the image is about when adding it to your website.
The alt text is content that highlights in simple terms what the image is about.
When creating the alt text, ensure your language is as simple as possible. There shouldn't be any ambiguous terms that can confuse the search engine spider. Also, if you have multiple products or services, ensure each has unique alt text. Having everything as a "product image" can harm your ranking strength.
4. Usage of Stock Images for Content
As a company, you might not have the budget to get custom imagery for your website. This is when you opt to buy stock images. Stock images are sold by popular vendors online, but they are not unique. Hundreds or even thousands of people might have bought the image you're using.
While stock images are critical to reducing costs, you must choose where to use them. Using stock images for backgrounds or other marketing collateral can be risky.
There might be competitors who have used the same image on their websites. It is important to pick and choose the right stock image you will use for your marketing.
5. Credit Original Authors for Images
Not all images have to be customized or bought from other people. Sometimes, you must use other people's images to reference your writing. This is mostly noticed during long copying, like in blogs. You can use images of facts or a screenshot of relevant content from the source.
While this is not wrong and comes under the fair-use policy, you must give due credit to the entity that created it. You can add the link either to the caption or within the content. A link to the original content would make it more legitimate and ensure improved SEO.
6. Resize Images for the Website
One of the essential things for image optimization to carry out is image resizing. When you add a large image to your website, it has to be resized every time the page is loaded.
This causes slower loading and needless overhead when clicking on your website. There might also be instances when the image you're using is too large for the page.
The solution is to ensure that you have a particular size of the image you use for specific needs. For example, your blog image headers should all be the same size natively. This prevents the website from having to resize each image while loading. It contributes significantly to loading speed.
7. Caption Your Images Creatively
One of the mistakes most SEO teams make is just to fill the caption to the brim with keywords. The problem with this approach is that though it might win searches, you'll lose the visitors.
When going through your website, people are looking for creative content. This also means image captions and other types of content.
As a brand, you need to come up with captions that are not just descriptive but creative. Nobody wants to read a caption that is just a description of the picture. "A boy playing with a dog" is boring. "Timmy playing with his best friend!" is more creative and likely to interest readers.
8. Never Replace Text With Images
Something that you should note is to ensure that keywords and phrases on your website are critical to ranking. As the adage goes, content is king, and you should be careful about replacing them with images. Replacing text on your website with images, when not done right, drops your rankings on searches.
The reason is that search engines cannot parse images as humans do. They rely more on alt text to understand what the images are about. Having relevant images and text for your marketing collateral is a good idea. That makes it good for both people and search engines.
9. Choose the Right Image Format
The image format that you choose has a huge impact on loading speeds and SEO metrics. However, no "right" image format exists - every format has its use and applications. Several types of image formats are available. Of these, the most used ones are JPG, GIF, and PNG.
You need to know the strengths and weaknesses of each to ensure that you choose the right one.
GIFs are animated sequences of images used when you need to showcase a video. PNG is one of the most widely used formats for websites. It can hold much information and support transparency, which is critical. JPG is for more compact use cases that don't need a lot of image quality.
10. Reduce File Size as Much as Possible
The key to image optimization is ensuring your images have the lowest footprint. Heavy, high-resolution images load slowly, frustrating people, especially mobile users. The key is ensuring you have the smallest file size without compromising image quality.
People make the mistake of focusing too much on image quality when it is not required. A good example is having high-quality images for smaller elements like buttons or thumbnails.
The user will not notice the lack of quality on a small image. There are several tools available that can help you reduce image sizes.
11. Choose the Right Image Compression
You need to choose the right compression to get the best results out of images. This is important because you ensure that the images you use are high-quality while still improving loading times. The balance has to be right with quality and compression ratio. It has to be decided on a case-to-case basis.
The two main compression techniques are lossless compression and lossy compression. Lossless compression is best suited to larger images that need higher quality. Lossy compression focuses on reducing the image size as much as possible, which means a loss in quality.
Next-generation image formats like WebP and JPEG XR offer superior compression and quality.
12. Ensure Optimized and Relevant File Names
An aspect that most companies overlook during image optimization is the file naming convention. Like alt text that we discussed, file names help give context to search engines for the images. It can greatly help your search engine visibility and help you compete against other brands.
Ensure you use descriptive and relevant file names when uploading images to your website. It helps if it has keywords, as it can add SEO strength. Keeping image names generic can cause issues when ranking your website. Another thing to look at is the length of the file names. A search engine can only recognize the first 60 characters of a filename. Keep it short and simple.
13. Create an Image Sitemap for the Website
A sitemap is a file that provides search engine crawlers with a list of pages on your website. Adding an image sitemap is a great idea for giving your website more SEO power. It can also bring your website more visibility through recommendations and searches.
Creating an image sitemap is a straightforward process. The first step is to gather all the information you need about images on your website. This can include URL, file name, alt text, and description.
Validate the sitemap so it doesn't have any errors. Next, create an XML file that includes all the information and submit it to search engines.
14. Add Geotagging to Your Images
Geotagging is the process by which location data is added to an image. The image's metadata contains information like where and when an image was taken. It also has information about the device with which the image was created.
One of the biggest advantages of geotags is that they can help you reach local audiences.
Almost all smart devices today have their geotagging techniques. If you're processing older images, ensure that you have an editing tool that can add geolocation for an image. Ensure that you embed the geotagging location into the file's metadata.
You can get more traffic from a specific location with geotagged images on your website.
15. Use Responsive Images for Mobile
Mobile traffic has outpaced other sources considerably, and most websites must focus on responsive design.
The principle of responsive design is to ensure that the website appears the same regardless of the device the user is on. It can considerably help loading times and make your website more dynamic.
Focus on using images that are scaled to mobile devices. Serve scaled images are resized dynamically depending on the device's screen size. Use the srcset attribute on the HTML code to ensure the browser selects the right image size.
16. Add Image Schema Markups
Schema markup is an important part of image optimization that marketers sometimes overlook. Simply put, schema markup is a code added to a website. It provides context for the information on your website to search engines. This can include the type of image, caption, URL, and other details.
Focus on choosing the optimal image schema markup for your website. Many types of markups are available, including "ImageObject" and "Photograph." You need to validate your schema markup and ensure it is error-free before submitting it.
17. Implement Browser Caching
Caching is a technique that can help you cut down on image loading times significantly. Browser caching allows a device to store frequently used images. The benefit is that load times are reduced without overheads on either party. It can be simple to implement and is used on all devices, from mobiles to desktop computers.
Browser caching lowers the number of requests made by clients to your website. It reduces the load on your network architecture as well. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can also lower loading latency. It ensures a fast-loading website regardless of where the user is on the globe.
18. Use Lazy Loading for Better Speed
An interesting development regarding website content is lazy loading. It allows a website to prioritize loading content and images above the fold. It defers loading elements out of the viewport to ensure a smoothly loading website for the user.
Lazy loading can give users the impression of a quicker website, even if it is image-heavy.
It can help certain types of businesses like e-commerce, where hundreds of elements must be loaded. A website developer can implement it with JavaScript. It detects when an image or content piece comes into the user's view and only renders them.
Lazy loading also reduces unnecessary data by only loading elements as required.
19. Opt for Open Graph and Twitter Cards
Social media is one of the most powerful platforms for businesses, and they're growing bigger. Open Graph and Twitter Card control how your website is displayed on social media.
Open Graph protocol enables a website link to appear like a rich object on social media. This allows it to be shared easily and gets more clicks from users.
Twitter Cards are used on Twitter to link your website. It displays a "card" containing information and images about your website. Like Open Graph, it gives users a richer experience and encourages more click-throughs of your posted content.
20. Use AI-Generated Images With Caution
With the flurry of AI-assisted imaging platforms, using them on your website might be tempting. While they are helpful for specific purposes, we still don't know how search engines will index them.
Another problem is that AI imagery lacks established trust with the audience. Some people attach negative sentiments to AI-generated images.
Key Takeaways
● Understand the usage rights and licenses of the images before you use them.
● Use unique and creative images for branding to stand out from your competition.
● Name your image files and add appropriate alt text before publishing them.
● Choose the type of image format and compression according to your needs.
● Avoid replacing critical keywords or text with images to ensure SEO strength.
● Use high-quality images where needed to improve engagement.
● Ensure images are accessible for visually-impacted people through effective alt text.
● Implement a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to improve loading speed for heavy images.
● Test images on different platforms to ensure they display correctly and load quickly.
● Leverage social sharing through Open Graph and Twitter Cards.
