Image SEO: Optimize Your Images To Get Higher Ranking On Search Engines

Today, the Internet is all about graphics and images. If you spend even one hour of your time on the Internet browsing web pages, just think out of the total time, how much time you ideally spend in reading? No answer! Well, it is a natural human instinct that grabs your attention to read the images first before you even read the content. Welcome to the magical world of Image SEO, the amount of keywords that you type in searching also searches the relevant images. Hence, marketers are now looking for methods and ways through which they can grab the audience’s attention through images. Image optimization is today the most touted methods that will enhance the visibility of your website on the search engines.

Understanding Image Optimization –

The quality of the webpage determines the readability of the webpage and thus helps in increasing reputation of the webpage on the search engines. Good content sells in the market well and so does the webpage with good image optimization. Image optimization is basically the method by which you can reduce the size of the image without affecting the quality of the image. The small size of the image helps to load the image faster on the web page.

Why Image Optimization is Important?

Image optimization helps to reduce the bounce rate of visitors on the website. The faster loading time for images will help retain the users on the website. The website and Image Optimization is highly important for google search engine ranking and improves the keyword prominence. 

The viewership of your webpage determines the brand image of your website in the market. As per the recent research, there are over 1.94 billion websites as of January 2019. There is indeed a lot of competition on the web to reach targeted audiences. Good images and good content on the website helps to get high traffic on the webpage. 

Vision is one of the most powerful senses of all the senses that humans have, it absorbs the data much faster than the written content. Hence, images are very critical elements when it comes to the optimization of your website on the web. The following facts determine, how visual content affects brain faster than the textual content:

• 90% data transmitted in the brain is visual
• Brain can process 1000 words of data in one single piece of image
• The visual image is recalled faster by upto 65% as compared to 10% for written content

In our fast paced lives, we have invented things for our conveniences that help us do our work quickly. We use smartphones just like mini computers, which can carry out all the tasks. People are using mobile apps so conveniently and hence it is very prominent that foot traffic on mobile apps is growing at a faster pace than desktop users. With shorter attention span of just 8 seconds today, mobile apps with more graphical images have taken place at the forefront. Hence it is highly important to optimize the images for mobile-friendly websites too, that will help users have a greater browsing experience.

How to improve your ranking by Image Optimization for SEO?

On-page optimization, Off-page optimization and Image Optimization are the 3 driving forces that helps you get on to the top of the search engines. In a layman’s term, you have to make your product beautiful and appealing for grabbing the attention from people to buy it. Similarly, you have to make your website appealing and make it Search engine friendly. Search engines love the original content and thus gives you a higher ranking. On-page optimization is the key to getting all the love from search engines and having visual content helps to attain the top position on search engines.

The important points to consider for Image optimization is the relevance of the image to the topic, the title tag, alt tag, image name, image size, file name and the linking of the image. Let us check each of these factors in brief that will help optimize your images on the searches made on search engines.

1. Relevancy of the Image – This is very important steps towards a proper optimization of the web page. The image should be placed at prominent places with relevant topics, if you are talking about housing and placing an image of a beach, makes no sense to search engines or either the users.
   
2. Alt Tag – Alt tag is one of the important factor of Image optimizations in SEO. They are displayed in the place of an image, in case the image is not loaded. Most search engines crawl through only what is written in the “Text” format so the place for image appears empty to the search engines. The alt tags tell search engines that there is an image here and informs it about the topic of the image. Alt tags need to be in short format yet descriptive.
3. Image size – The size of your image can directly affect the loading time of the page, hence it is one of the most important elements to be extremely taken care of. Compress your image before uploading them and make use of images with .jpg instead of .png. If you are using WordPress, you can use plug-ins that help you optimize the image size and also convert the png files into a jpeg.
4. Image Hosting – Image hosting is very important from an optimization point of view. It is said that the image hosted on the same domain as text are given higher priority than the images that are hosted on another domain. The criteria for a preference of image search is hidden but the algorithm for Google image search checks how the image is blended with the textual content of the webpage.
5. Filename – Filenames are important for search engines to read the content of the image. Hence, do not use default image file names, one can rather put the file’s name that has relevance with the topic. You can make use of hyphen in between to make it more descriptive. WordPress plug-ins for SEO friendly images convert the image file names to ALT tags making it very easy for the process of optimization.
6. Title tags and linking of the image – A relevant image linked with the title tags goes a long way in boosting traffic on your website. Avoid linking the image directly, make use of anchor text for linking the images. The image SEO gives better results while embedding the image in guest posts or other page that is linked on your website. Always use title tags for linking the images, it provides as tool tip whenever someone hovers the cursor on the link. Using SEO friendly description and keywords in the title tags ensures a good optimization strategy for better search results.
   

Integrating Social media for Image SEO

Social Media is one of the biggest platforms to reach out to your audiences. It helps companies with a good social media strategy to acquire more customers and increase their market visibility. The best way you can utilize your SEO friendly images in social media is by putting social media sharing buttons on the website.

Apart from the above-stated image SEO tips, one can always refer Google’s webmaster guidelines that help you with varied tips and steps to optimize the website with keywords and image optimization.