Whether you are writing a blog, an article, or maybe even designing web pages, it will come a time where you will need to add images to your content. Online content always needs ideas to make them more attractive to search engines and improve SEO rank. In this guide, we will explain some of the basic concepts and give you some image optimization tips for search engines.

Image SEO is a technique you want to master. It will help increase traffic to your site and increase user experience. Good image optimization will attract users and reduce loading times for your page while maintaining quality images.

When was the last time you uploaded images on your website? It is highly probable that when you did, you used stock photos from a stock photography site. You may think this is an excellent example of optimization, but you can’t be further from the truth.

Adding stock images to your website will impact negatively as most surely the photos are not SEO friendly.

Every day millions of people use Google images to look for content online. Data Google has shown that 20% of all searches go through the Google images search engine. SEO amateurs and professionals should know if they already don’t optimize your site images is worth the effort. Having your media optimized for google images and videos will help your SEO and improve your page’s overall experience.

A good example would be two bloggers who have shown the importance and relevance of Image SEO. By optimizing their images, one of them got his image to rank first in Google’s image search results, while the other improved the traffic his site received by adding image alt tags, good alt text, and other SEO tips.

Image optimization creates many advantages, such as better user experience, faster loading times, and an increasingly important role.

What is image optimization in SEO?

As in Copywriting SEO, Image optimization in SEO is the Search engine optimization of images to get a better experience. User experience is becoming increasingly important for the Google search engine algorithm. This is calculated by various factors that include the relevancy of the content, the keywords used, the titles, and the page load times.

Some people may add multiple images to their web pages to rank higher in the search results thinking that it will trick the algorithm into ranking their site higher. Stuffing images will not work. Google search engines will determine if the images you use on your web page are from a stock photos site or original.

As mentioned above, page load time has become a significant factor when determining the SEO score your web page receives. Having multiple image files in your site will make the overall page SEO score go down, as this will increase load time by a lot. We are not saying to add visual content to your page but do it correctly.

Typically, the images you edit and crate through Photoshop and Illustrator will look great, but the end image file size will often be way too big. As you can imagine, this image’s file sizes are way too big for your site to load even less with multiple photos. So image optimization, in the end, is saving or compiling your image files in a friendly file format so that your web page decreases its load time.

Images hold more data than just pixels. This data adds to the unnecessary size some photos have. By modifying it, you can create an image with a small image file size that doesn’t hugely affect your page load time.

Optimization of SEO images is not a hard job but one that people seem to struggle with. People don’t pay the necessary attention to this part of SEO optimization.

The best way to optimize your images will be to use the tips we have here that will help your page SEO to become higher:

1. Name your images descriptively and in simple language.
2. Optimize your alt tags carefully.
3. Choose your image dimensions and product angles wisely.
4. Reduce the file size of your images.
5. Choose the correct format.
6. Optimize your thumbnails.
7. Use image sitemaps.
8. Beware of decorative images.
9. Use caution when using content delivery networks (CDNs).
10. Test your images.
11. Include image structured data
12. Use lazy loading

Name your images descriptively and in simple language.

It is effortless to go through lots of product images while not changing the name the camera gives them. When talking about image SEO, it is essential to use relevant keywords in your image file names to better your page with the search engines. Search engine crawlers will go through your text and your image file name to look for keywords and assigning a rank.

When thinking about what image file names you should use, think about the product image you are posting, what your customers ‘ naming patterns are, and use that as an image file name. If you are not going to get any data, try and use relevant keywords relevant to the image that your users might use when searching for your product or content when choosing a file name.

Remember that Google uses the URL and your images’ file name to understand what the image is about. Having clear file names will help your image SEO and make it easier for the Google image search engine to rank your image ranking.

Optimize your alt tags carefully.

Here is the source code of a complete HTML tag:

<img src=”image.jpg”alt=”image description” title=”image tooltip”>

The title and alt attributes of an image are commonly referred to as alt tag or alt text and title tag. Technically, they are not alt tags but alt attributes. The alt text describes what is on the image and its function on the page. If you use an image as a button to do something, then the alt text should say: “button to do something.”

The alt tag is used by screen readers, which are browsers used by people with disabilities such as blindness and other visually impaired people. These browsers read the alt text to inform them what the image is. Each image should have an alt tag, such as alt text. Not just because of SEO but also because of the blind and visually impaired people who wouldn’t be able to engage with the page if not because of this. Alt attributes are not required but are encouraged.

There are cases where images don’t have any other purpose than providing a better user experience. In those cases, there is no descriptive alt necessary as there is no value in adding alt text. In those cases, you can leave the alt tags empty. If by any chance, you are using WordPress, you can leave the alt text field blank in the image settings tab if the need arises. We highly recommend, though, filling up any alt text you may have as it will help a lot with your page rank.

Google has a whole article about images where they talk about alt text and other image optimization tips. The Google image algorithm uses the alt text in the pictures to determine what the image is and how it fits with its content. This is why it is best to have photos with essential keywords related to your text’s theme but not overdo them. If you add too many keywords, it may result in keyword stuffing, and the alt text will become an unpleasant experience for the users.

Choose your image dimensions and product angles wisely

For example, when trying to sell something, don’t just post one image from the product. Show different angles of the product. The best way to capitalize on these extra photos is to fill up their alt attribute and alt text with unique text for each of them.

The main point of doing this is to add descriptions to your base alt attribute and so that the alt attribute lands future searchers land in your page. If you take the extra work to have quality alt text and a good image quality SEO, Google will reward you.

To make it easier for you to adapt your images to different screen sizes, you can make them responsive images. Responsive photos are indexed to adjust to different screen sizes, whether they are mobile or other types of screens, and don’t make the image feel out of place. This will improve their image ranking in Google search engine results as they will adapt to all screen sizes improving user’s experiences with the image and, more importantly, your website.

Reduce the file size of your images

For a site to host images without being compressed will be a nightmare. The file size of the pictures alone will increase loading time by a significant margin. This margin can be the difference between a successful page and a failure. Search engines will decrease your page’s rank based on the image SEO and all because of the image file sizes.

Optimizing SEO images will help them rank higher in the google image search algorithm. Not only will this help you with the ranking but also to get new customers or readers. Nearly 50% of people won’t even wait 3 seconds to load a site.

So, what can you do to decrease the file size? In simple terms, it is the removal of any unnecessary data that is saved within your images to make the file size smaller. It also depends on where the image will be located on your web page. If you optimize your photos, you can decrease your page load speed by up to 80%.

There are two file types of images, Lossy and Lossless.

Lossy compression is when data from the original image (JPEG or GIF file types, for example) are lost. Once you do a Lossy compression, there is no going back to the image’s actual state. WordPress, for example, uses a Lossy compression rate of 90% to optimize JPEG file-type images. The benefit of using a Lossy compression for your page images is that Lossy reduces the file size, but they consider a loss in a quality image.

Images saved in lossless format have been reduced, but there is no quality loss in their pictures. This is done by removing unnecessary metadata from JPEG and PNG files. Images compressed in LossLess are saved in RAW, BMP, GIF, and the PNG file type. The benefit of LossLess is that you can retain the quality of images and still achieve a smaller size.

Choose the correct format.

To optimize the images you are going to use in your site, and you should see what image formats you want to use and what format is best for each image. Photos take up to 21% of the total weight of a page. There are a variety of file types you can use on your site. This ranges from PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIFs, among others. What file type should you use on your site, and what are their differences?

In PNG files, you get better quality images, but the image file size remains large. This could be used for essential photos that are supposed to be the center of attention in your content. In JPEG, you can lose quality in favor of a smaller image file size, but you can adjust the quality level and the file size to balance it.

WebP is a new format that Google is developing. It is superior to both PNG and JPEG in that it tries to do what both forms do. With WebP, developers and web admins will create images with smaller file sizes that make their site faster. WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in file size than PNGs and 25-34% smaller in file size than JPEG images while maintaining the same quality.

Optimize your thumbnails

Many e-commerce sites will use thumbnail images to showcase products or in the category section. Imagine if you’re not optimizing images of the loading time for these images. The customers would leave even before the thumbnails are done loading. Imagine your page’s load time with that amount of pictures on your site without being optimized.

For example, in these cases, you can make your image file size to be small by sacrificing quality. You have to remember that the alt text should be different in these images than in the main product image. The alt text should be as diverse as possible.

Google badges was a google initiative to help users find exactly what they want when searching through mobile devices. These badges will help users identify what type of content the image is linked to. Currently, the badges are only used for recipes, videos, products, and GIFs. There are still doubts whether Google will develop more badges in the future.

Here is part of Google’s statement:

“When you want to bake cupcakes, but you don’t know what kind, Image Search can help you make a decision. Finding an image with a recipe can be challenging: you might end up on a page with only pictures of these delicious things or a cupcake fan site that doesn’t have recipes but everything else about them. To help users find exactly what they want, Image Search on mobile devices now includes relevant badges on the thumbnails.”

If you have media content on your website, you can help users identify media content with the main website content by using structured data. By doing this, you will get better-targeted traffic to your website and help users find relevant content faster.

Depending on your web page’s type of content, you can add the Recipe markup, the Product markup, or the Video markup. In GIFs, Google has said that their algorithm will automatically badge them.

There are no guaranteed badges on your thumbnails, but adding structured data fields and optimizing them through alt text may increase the chance of them getting badges and appearing in image searches.

Googles Rich Cards report in the Search Console can help you get more information on your markup stats, and you can verify any errors in your structured data by using the Structured Data Testing Tool.

Use image sitemaps

Suppose you are using pop-ups or other ways to improve the customer’s experience or the user’s experience, and these images are not marked as such in the code. In that case, image sitemaps will help these images to get noticed by the search engine crawlers.

You can insert the following line in your robots.txt file to show the path your image sitemap:

Image sitemap: http:/example.com/sitemap_location.xml

Another way to do this is by submitting the image sitemap to the Google search console.

Google has many guides in improving image SEO publishing which may help your website rank higher thanks to image SEO. Using google sitemaps also helps google get more information from your website. Simultaneously, it allows Google to recognize more images than they would typically do on their own. Don’t forget that using Google sitemaps is not a guaranteed way for your photos to be indexed, but it is a good step towards image SEO.

Remember to add tags and alt text to all of your images. Image alt text and all the necessary information of your pictures will help you with google ranking.

Beware of decorative images.

Websites often have decorative images for seo. Anything that isn’t product-related will most likely be a decorative image. This can be buttons, a background image, among others.

Although they have an aesthetic appeal, they can increase the file size significantly. Therefore affecting the image SEO rank and making your page’s rank go down.

Try and use a template that makes file sizes smaller and not that many photos, which can affect your SEO results. We have some tips to reduce decorative images for seo file size:

• If the image makes up the borders or is just simple patterns, save them as PNG-8 or GIFs. This will make the file size smaller to only a few bytes.
• Use CSS to create colored areas instead of using images for seo.
• If you are using a wallpaper-style background image, check its size. They are, most of the time big sized files. Reduce its size as much as possible without ruining image quality.

Another trick would be to cut out the middle part of your background image and make it transparent or flat color. This will decrease the size of the file substantially.

Use caution when using Content Delivery Networks.

Be wary of Content Delivery Networks. This doesn’t mean I don’t use them but to take care when doing so. They are the go-to place to host images and other media files. They can decrease page load speeds and help solve bandwidth issues.

The problem with this is backlinks. As you know, backlinks are a huge factor for SEO, and the more backlinks you have, the better the rank Google gives you is. Placing your images in a CDN, you remove the links to your domain and link them to the CDN domain. Depending on the amount of traffic you have, it will be better not to use CDN and use your current hosting service. If you receive a large number of visits, then go with CDN. If you are only getting a few thousand holidays, don’t worry and keep your current hosting service.

There are ways around image SEO issues that are connected with CDNs. It will be best to have professional help when dealing with this to help you what to do.

Test your images

The whole point of optimizing SEO images is to increase your search engine results rank. How do we test our pictures to see if they convert into more customers? You try it by following his tips:

• Test how many product images you put per page. Some sites have fewer product images per page, affecting their customer’s loading speed. Also, having many pictures on a single page will improve the user’s experience and lead to more visits.
• Test how many products you should have to con category pages. Some customers may like to have 10, 20, or even 100 products per category page. You should try and see what works best for the people visiting your website.

Include image structured data

Structured data allows the webmaster or web developer to mark up information about the website. It helps search engines to understand what a website is about. This includes information about media, such as a recipe image on your website.

When searching for recipes, you can see that some of the results contain a complementary image. This is because Google knew to associate the recipe sites with an image. All this is based on the structured data provided.

You can add structured data to recipe websites and a lot of other sites as well. Schema.org is a company that manages most of the structured data we use on the web. It is also the go-to page for using and doing structured data.

If your image can add value and context to the website and your content and you believe it helps, adding it to image search would be a good idea to make it appear on Google’s radar and improve SEO with structured data, then go for it. It will help search engines find your site’s media information quickly and efficiently.

Use lazy loading

When trying to get a good SEO rank, you must surely have realized that Google ranks loading speed as one factor to rank web pages. Most websites with over 2.5 seconds of loading time will lose users. Having media on your website will increase your SEO rank but will at the exact time increase loading times. This brings us a dilemma. What is better? Having media on your website or having a low loading time? The answer is both, and a way to do this is by using lazy loading.

Lazy loading works in the following way:

• Someone visits your website.
• Your server receives the request.
• Rather than load the whole website and make the user wait, the server only loads the visible part of the page to navigate the website faster.

This means our users will get to the content faster and will get the desired information in no time. Do take into account that this is not a magic solution. We still don’t recommend overloading your websites with media files that will increase loading time and will saturate your pages, causing a bad experience for your users.

What plugins should you use?

You can use many plugins while using WordPress to help you improve your website’s SEO. These plugins will show you SEO projections and recommend you the website’s design. They will help you with broken backlinks and verify image size and downsize them if needed in the necessary formats.

The nine most used Plugins are the following ones:

• Yoast SEO
• The SEO Framework
• SEOPress
• Rank Math
• SEO Squirrly
• Broken Link Checker
• Rel NoFollow Checkbox
• All in One Schema Rich Snippets
• WordLift

These plugins will not only help you with your Copywriting SEO, but with your Image SEO, your overall page SEO will improve as well as the ranking Google will give you.

Optimize for SafeSearch

When turned on, SafeSearch is a Google addon that filters out all explicit media content and websites in the search results. You should optimize your media content so that the algorithm can understand your content’s nature and apply SafeSearch settings to it if the need arises.

Many users prefer to have SafeSearch as maybe kids use the same devices like them. That is why we ask pages that may contain explicit content to add in their metadata a meta tag that will identify them as an adult website or if your website has a variety of content to group the explicit content in a standard URL.

This is not a big issue for most websites, but having it optimized for SafeSearch may help SEO scoring even without any explicit content on your site.

Key takeaways

Media content, especially images, has started to play a significant role in SEO. Still, as you’ve realized, image SEO is not easy as it has many things that need to be done. Thankfully, a lot of the work required for image SEO can be automated. But remember that SEO is never done, and new updates come out every year, so when factoring in your website’s performance, take into account the media content you have in it.