How to Optimize Images for SEO?

Images have become an integral part of the website content. People love to interact with visuals instead of some plain text. And if you have an e-commerce website, no one can understand the importance of images better than you. In an online e-commerce business, the sale of your products depends heavily on the product images along with other factors. So, it is essential to have optimized website images across different platforms. Also, images are one of the SEO ranking factors. If your website images are optimized as per SEO, you can enjoy benefits of the top Google SERP rankings.

So, let’s learn how to optimize images for SEO. Here are some useful tips which are easy to implement:

Find the Right Image

This is the most basic step. Always, use the right images on your website. You should find out such images which are related to your site content. For example, if you are finding images for the ethnic wear category then you should not be using any western wear image. Also, do not always go for the stock images. Stock images are available to everyone, and the same image is likely to be used by one or many websites. So, try to add your brand touch to the images you use. And if you can not afford a graphic designer for this work then there are plenty of tools which can surely save you a fortune such as Canva, Pixlr, etc.

Name Your Images in Plain English

The names of your images should have your target keywords, and they should be in plain and descriptive English. Do not keep your image name as it was at the time of downloading. The keyword rich image names can improve the search ranking of your page, For example, if you are using an image of iPhone 8, do not use the default name which can be something like this fgdegrtj56.jpg. Instead of this, name your image as “Apple iPhone 8 Space Grey.jpg. This includes your target keyword and helps you in improving your On-page SEO.

Always Use Alt Tags

Alt Tags or Alternate Tags is one of the most recommended practices in the On-Page SEO when it comes to optimizing website images. As the name suggests, the Alt tag is the text alternative which appears when your images do not load or if your browser is facing any problem in rendering the images. An Alt Tag should be written in plain English with target keywords like the name of the image. But, do not stuff the keywords. Keep it natural and simple. For example, for the image of iPhone 8, the Alt text can be “Apple iPhone 8 space grey”. Avoid keyword stuffing like “buy iPhone 8 at the lowest price now”. Doing this can harm your On-Page SEO.

Optimize Your Website Images - Responsive & Smaller Size

Does your site take much time to load? If yes, then it can be because of poor image handling. According to a blog post of Kissmetrics, most of the users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Image optimization proves to be very beneficial when it comes to making your site faster. Using the right type of images in smaller KBS can help you a lot.

Always reduce the size of images before you use them. If you have a WordPress website, then you can use image optimization plugins such as WP Smush. EWWW, etc. For other sites, you can use ‘save for web’ option in the Adobe Photoshop or Tinypng, JPEGmini, etc. The best way is to use real-time image optimization to optimize your website images. Faster websites tend to attract more traffic and provide a great user experience. Also, if the images are optimized and your website loads faster then it improves your website’s SEO ranking.

Use Image Sitemaps

Image sitemap is an XML sitemap which is used to let Google bots know about all your website images. It contains information about your website images and helps the crawlers to crawl every link. Using Google Webmaster Tools, you can submit image sitemap and can also check errors or warnings. You can also check suggestions to format your sitemap using Webmaster guidelines and suggestions correctly.

Thus, image optimization is also one of the critical SEO ranking factors. So, optimize your website images to improve your SEO ranking and boost your website performance.