Best Practices to Optimize Your Image For SEO Better Rank

bynewmarketpro

3K followers

Updated 6 years ago

The whole SEO strategies involve a lot of things, on-site as well as off-site. It is important to look at it at every single aspect and not focus on one or some aspects of it. Every single efforts to strengthen your website's SEO will make a difference in long run.

Image optimization is something we always overlooked.

Taking a bit of your time to optimize each image you uploaded to your site will help you to boost your competitiveness in the search engines. It also engages your audience much better.

Why Images Are important for SEO

Images have its own role in the construction of a website.

Reading a website with a great images tends to keep readers on your site longer and reduce your site bounce rate. This really matters in Google algorithm in the behavior metrics as it reflects user experience on a particular site.

Research verifies that people are 80% more likely read content with images and 64% more likely to remember it afterward.

Tips to Improve SEO for Images

Use relevant high quality Images.

Commit yourself to get at least one good image on each post.

Make sure your images are relevant to the content. Don't let your users to make their own assumption in the relation of the image displayed and the messages you want to convey in your content.

Never use blurry or badly cropped images as it will reflect bad impression on you as the site owner. Crucial.

Make sure you use images that you have rights to use.

I believe we have discussed this in many posts here in WA. Do not use images that you don't have the rights to use. If you want to use an image which is not classified as free to use (CC0), make sure you got the permission from the original owner.

We are fortunate that we have access to free images in our site-rubix. As much as possible, just use one of these images for your site. If you can't find something relevant to your content, maybe get one by taking the picture yourself.

I have written a blog post where you can source free images for your site.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/newmarketpro/blog/57-free-ph...

Customize the filename

Take time to customize the filename and include your target keyword in there.

While this is not seen by your visitors, it matters to search engines. You don't want to let your filename as something like e.g. image12344.jpg. It's nice to have something like 'how-to-use-xxx.jpg'.

Use alt tags

This is another part your visitors won't see but it's good SEO practice to always implement alt-text to all your images. And it is easy to accomplish.

Use the right quality-to-size ratio

We have discussed before that images is one of the culprits that may slow down your site. So before you upload any image to your post, make sure the size is something you need before uploading. You don't want to upload an image which is much larger than you need.

I have shared in one of my blog posts how you can compress your images before uploading them to your site.

https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/newmarketpro/blog/why-you-ne...

Other similar tools you can use are TinyPNG and JPEGmini to make this process easy.

Choose the right file type

We normally upload images with extension .png and .jpg as these are the extension that are more compatible with websites.

Use .gif images sparingly as it does not support a wider color range as .png and jpg.

Add images to your sitemap

If you are using AIOS plugin, the sitemap created by the plugin has incorporated images into the sitemap. So I believe this is done. If you have skipped this in the past, you want to make sure to include them in your sitemap after you have completed with your image optimization.

If you hate AIOS for whatever reason, you can use Google Image Sitemap plugin to do so.

Host images on your own site

Unless your site is filled up with a lot of images with high resolution, you want all your images are uploaded to your site server and not a third party.

A reliable hosting provider like WA would let you know if the images are displayed properly and you don't have to concern of server overloading.

[WARNING: Do not use this practice for images from Amazon affiliate site as it is a breach of their TOS] - I warned you!! :)

So that's about it.

Hope this is helpful to you and you can start optimize all your images that you uploaded to your site.

It sounds a small matter, but doing it as best practice will have the snow-ball effect and help boost your site ranking.

Sign off.

Work Smart Not Hard

⊂◉‿◉つ

Joe