An important reason for your website’s low traffic can be image. How? We very well know that our websites should be well-optimized for web, for mobile phones and so on and so forth. But many people ignore image optimization. Yes, optimization of image is as important as optimization of website.
We may not realize it but images play a very crucial role in ranking our websites on search results. They enhance the website’s visibility as a result of which users are able to find them. The number of image oriented platforms are growing day by day. People like to see information visually. Search engines acknowledge this trend. Most recent insights show that about 28 percent of customary Google search results contains images, up from 19 percent just two years ago. We can witness that by how search engines are consistently investing in new features to improve the Google images user experience.
So, if you are also struggling to draw traffic on your site, you should probably look in the optimization of images on your website. In today’s article I am going to talk about seven methods by using which you can optimize the images on your website to get better search results.
Let’s dig right in
7 Methods to optimize images for better search results
How would you guarantee you can get a lot of visibility in Google Image?
First of all, Googlebot should be able to crawl, index and comprehend what your pictures are about. Only then they would be able to rank.
From the latest updates to Google Images we have come to the understanding that relevance and quality are a higher priority than anytime in recent memory. That implies giving the search engine with as much context as possible.
Lets see seven methods to optimize the images in order to get better search results
1. Put out quality content content
Search engine rewards pages with quality content. This applies to the data on the web page that your image is facilitated on, and to the image itself. Google discourages pages with copied text as well as copied image. So, try to take your own photos and make your own graphics. When you use image from elsewhere you should always honor the copyright, license fees or trademark laws. And if you are using stock photos modify them by editing with filters or cropping etc.
2. Never forget to create Alt attributes
Adding Alt attributes to images is a crucial part to enhance the SEO strategy. It gives search engine valuable information about the image. It also describes to visually impaired users what the image is all about. According to the level of appropriateness, use relevant keywords you are targeting to explain the image. With linked images, search engines treat the alt attributes as the link anchor text.
3. Optimization of image file size
It is important to find out the balance between the minimum file size and maximum quality. You can resize and crop the images so that they are not larger in dimension than they will be displayed. Choose the most efficient file format. You can mix different types of images on the same web page. Compress the images to reduce the file size.
4. Descriptive file name
The name of the image file is important. This is because the file name helps the search engine understand the content of the image. It matters for SEO. While saving image file, describe the photo in clear words. For instance, if the picture is of a laptop then you can include the term ‘laptop’ in the name of the file.
5. Fast loading speed
Fast speed of a website is important for overall user experience. As large size images can slow down the speed of the website. You should keep size of the file as small as possible. Make sure the images are responsive which means they will automatically fit to the users devices screen.
6. Track your traffic
It is necessary to track the traffic on your website that is image-based. You can track organic search traffic from Google images by using the Search Console Performance Report. You can also access the referral report from Analytics. Analyse and take a baseline from which you can measure your traffic grow as you apply SEO to images.
7. Embedded text
You should be cautious against embedding important text in an image. For instance, do not put a menu thing or page heading in a picture, put that text on the page. It is better that your navigation , headings and other significant words you want indexed be on-page text. Also analyze the content around the image. Ensure that it gives context to the image and hence user.
Wrapping up
Image optimization is necessary for getting organic traffic on your site. Make sure the images on your website are well-optimized and if not, then follow the above mentioned methods to optimize the images. By putting out quality content, naming the file with right name and right size of the image can improve the SEO of your image. This will improve the overall SEO strategy of your website.
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