Image SEO, It is the part that most bloggers or website owners ignore. There could be many reasons for this, but according to studies, images can drive huge traffic. Sometimes the quality is also far better than search. So I highly recommend you to focus some of your time on optimizing images on your site. In this discussion, I am going to explain all the tactics and tools that help you to optimize the images.
I have seen that some of the bloggers are taking advantage of this image optimization and driving huge traffic to their website and making money from AdSense. This mostly happens when there are festival seasons. They just create some images related to those fests and correctly optimize them and post it to their website.
So here you can see the power of image optimization and rank in image search.
Today I am going to show you various tactics for optimizing images on your website.
How Google ranks images?
When you compare both indexing natural text post and images, it is much more difficult for search engines to index images. Because Google is not capable of understanding what’s in the images. But Google has some clues to find the content on the image. Google is known to be experimenting with artificial intelligence algorithms to improve detection of content on images.
Search engines are now experimenting with OCR (Optical character recognition) to read text on documents. But most of the times images don’t have text to read, In that case, Google uses facial recognition method to know who’s in the image.
In this similar way, Google has its own ways to find and understand the images.
Image optimization tips:
Let’s start looking at ways to optimize your images.
- Make sure the image file name or image src contains your primary (main) keyword. If it is an image of Google, name the file as Google.jpg and upload it to your website. The image path will look like https://www. searchenginecall .com/google.jpg.
- You must use the image alt attribute. The search engines will have a better idea of what your image is all about when you add an alt attribute. The format of writing the HTML code to insert alt attribute is : <img alt=”Google image” src=”https://www. searchenginecall .com/google.jpg”/>
- Give a title attribute to the image. The title attribute is used for both search engines and users. The image description will appear when a user hovers over to the image. <img alt=”Google image” src=”https://www. searchenginecall .com/google.jpg” title=”Google Image”>
- Use quality images. Because Google is not going to rank low-quality images. So make sure images are high in quality and low in size. This can be achieved by compressing the image sizes. If you are using the Adobe Photoshop you’ll have an option “Save for Web”. By this, you can reduce the image size without losing the quality of an image. There are some online tools available to do so, the site like tinypng.
- Keep your images as close as possible to the root domain. I mean that put your images on the next level of folder. For example, upload the image to https://www. searchenginecall .com/google.jpg instead of uploading to https://www.searchenginecall.com/content/images/20/11/25/google.jpg.
- Don’t use the images that are subjected to copyright. Use only original images or at least make some modification to the images. If you take an image from any public domain and needs credit for the author ‘just give the credit’. There no need to afraid of giving a credit to the author if you are using his images.
- Create a separate sitemap for the images and submit it to Google in Google Search Console.
- If you are using WordPress and if you don’t have time to optimize all the images separately use the plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-image/. This plugin does all the work you need. But remember it is another plugin you are installing on your WordPress site which may affect site loading speed.
Conclusion:
I hope the information provided above may help you to optimize the images on your site. If you have any problems or questions regarding image SEO please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.
