It is no secret that images help ensure that your content is engaging, interesting, and accessible, but did you know that they are just as important for your SEO efforts? In this blog, we will go over some of the reasons as to why images are an important part of SEO and how you can optimize them to ensure that you are making the most of your digital marketing strategy.
First, images help provide search engines with important contextual information. Second, when images are optimized, they help improve your site speed and can increase user engagement and your rankings.
As a business, it is important to know the basics of image optimization as it can give you the opportunity to thrive when it comes to your SEO efforts. Image optimization involves creating and delivering high-quality images that have the ideal format, size, and resolution to ensure that user engagement is at its best. Additionally, it includes correctly labeling the images to ensure that search crawlers are able to read and understand the context.
Because images on websites make up a significant amount of a web page’s weight, meaning that they consume more bytes than other parts of the website, the format, size, resolution, and complexity certainly influence a website’s performance significantly.
If you reduce the size of the images on your website without compromising the quality, the site speed will improve significantly, and as a result, the user experience for your website visitors will improve as well. User experience is truly everything, meaning that once improved, your search engine rankings, engagement, conversions, and customer retention will subsequently improve as well. Here are some ways you can optimize the images on your website:
1. Resize images
The image size should be the right balance between size and resolution, without compromising the quality. When images are too big and not optimized, it can result in slower page loads.
2. Choose the correct format
There are many different formatting options for images, including some of the most common like JPEG, PNG, and SVEG files. But each formatting option has different uses and should be used specifically its use.
3. Compress the image file
Reducing the image file and source size are just as important as reducing its size and resolution, therefore, compressing the image file should never be ignored.
4. Test the optimization for speed
The load speed on web pages is crucial and can be impacted by the images on the page. Therefore, it is extremely important to optimize the images on your site and test the optimization for speed to ensure that your visitor’s user experience isn’t impacted by this, which can result in high bounce rates.
5. Optimize the image file names
Many people do not think to name the file of images correctly, but it does matter. Take a moment to rename the file, which should be relevant to the image, before uploading them to your website.
6. Utilize alt tags
Alt tags, otherwise known as alt text, is helpful when a user may not be completely sure of what they are searching for. Providing relevant text for your image can help search engines and users identify your image correctly. It is important to use words that represent the image, but you don’t want to get too specific, which can lead to limiting its exposure. Additionally, being too general will give exposure; however, it may be blocked out by millions of other images that also have general alt tags. So you’ll definitely want to meet somewhere in the middle, taking advantage of the exposure you will get.
7. Include image captions
If it makes sense to do so, including image captions is helpful as well. Provide an accurate image caption to add any necessary additional context to the image.
8. Use unique images
While using stock images is fine, it is always best to use unique images. However, because they are stock images, it is likely that other websites are using the same images. So whenever possible, it is ideal to use unique images as it is always better for SEO purposes.
9. Ensure that the content on the page is relevant to the image
Undoubtedly, images are important to SEO but you always want to make sure that the content on the page is relevant to the image. You never want to just add an image to the page for the sake of it, resulting in it being completely out of the blue. It should always make sense as to why it is there.
About Branding Los Angeles
If you are struggling with optimizing your images for SEO, it is always best to consult with a team of experts with extensive experience in SEO and other digital marketing efforts. At Branding Los Angeles, our team specializes in web design, branding, SEO, and many digital marketing efforts. Contact our team to learn how we can help enhance your website and digital marketing.