If you intend to improve your web page’s search engine ranking, a large part of the on-page metrics will be devoted to optimizing content, indicators related to metadata, link structure, source code and other SEO measures. But many overlook images when planning actions to be taken for SEO. Although it is an important part of the content, the images that contain SEO images are registered by Google, which affects the rating of users, a factor that also has a positive effect on your site’s ranking naturally. So it is fair to say that by doing good SEO for images, you are killing two birds with one stone. If you want to increase the likelihood that your content will appear in search results on this platform, follow our guidelines.
Images, when used correctly, will help your readers understand your article better. The Google adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” may not apply, but it is certainly true when you need to add 1,000 boring words, explain what you mean in a data flow chart or diagram, or create more engaging social media posts. The solution is simply add images to your article
And make it more attractive. On top of that, visual search is getting more and more important, as evidenced by Google’s vision for the future of search – it may turn out to give you a lot of traffic. And if you already have visual content, it makes a lot of sense to SEO your images and make it your SEO concern.
If you want to improve the visibility of your content in Google Images, provide an excellent user experience by designing pages that are primarily intended for users and not search engines. Here are some tips:
It’s always better to use original photos – photos you took yourself, better than stock photos. Your article needs an image that is relevant to its topic. If you are just adding a random image to get a green tick in the Yoast SEO plugin content analysis, you are doing it wrong. The image must reflect the topic of the article or have illustrative purposes within the article. Also try to place the image in the correct place near the relevant text. If you have an important picture, try to put it at the top of the page, if its place makes sense. Do not try to put the pictures out of context or without justification. There is a simple reason for doing image SEO and it is simply the image that contains the text associated with the keyword that gets the best ranking.
If you don’t have any original photos that you took yourself, there are other ways you can find new unused photos like Flickr.com. It is a site where you can download beautiful and unique pictures from it. Just remember to credit the original photographer. We also like the images provided by sites like Unsplash. Stay away as much as possible from plain stock photos, and if you’re using stock photos, choose photos that look more realistic.
But no matter what you’re using, you’ll likely find that photos with people in them always look like stored photos. Unless you took the pictures yourself, which is always the best idea. The obvious alternatives to images can be infographics or illustrations, which is what we use at Yoast for our image SEO.
Maintaining an SEO optimized positioning is essential for both users and search engines. To do this in the best way, it is necessary to take into account many aspects. Below we are going to tell you 10 aspects that you should consider in order to properly perform your image SEO or image SEO process.
It is necessary to create descriptive names with significant keywords to name the image file. It is better to put Agency-seo.jpg instead of Img256.jpg to help search engines better understand the image and this is also one of the most important steps of image seo work.
Before you start adding images to your website, make sure you choose the best . There are many image formats to choose from, the most popular of which are:
Use the WebP format, an open format developed by Google in 2010, that is compatible with most browsers. This format tries to reduce the size of the images to reduce the loading time. To convert your images to this format, you can use plug-ins such as “WebP Express”
Photographs must be proportionate in size and weight. Try to make sure that your images are clear, of good quality, and do not exceed 100k. You can help yourself by using tools like “Screaming Frog” to check if you have too heavy pictures. You can reduce its size or weight with “TinyPNG, Photoshop, or WP Smush”.
Use images that are related to the content you provide on your website. If you include relevant images, it will improve the user experience, thus improving the SEO of the images and improving their position in search engines.
Alt text is very important as it helps to identify bots and browsers. It is also a very useful feature because it helps to know and understand the content of images more clearly. To work on this tag properly and take advantage of it in image seo, it is recommended to use an important keyword that describes the image, and not just put one word and try to make it different from the title of the image.
Do not forget to optimize the image seo to be compatible with mobile phones with a responsive design, which makes the image fit the size of the device. Remember that mobile traffic goes beyond desktop in a large part of websites and e-commerce, and mobile usage does not stop growing and increasing day by day.
If you include your images in your sitemap.xml file, Google will prioritize them, making it easier to crawl them. You can add images to your existing sitemap.
The lazy load or idle, or asynchronous after-load . It is a technique in which the loading of an image is deferred until it is not used. The main goal is to optimize resources, improve speed and load times, and improve user experience. This technique can be implemented with some specialized plugins.
To improve the local search of your images, you can locate this and make it easy for Google to show your images in the local search. You can do this through GeoImgr web or tools such as Microsoft Photo Tools.
Try to use 100% original photos, edit free or royalty-free photos, and avoid duplicate photos. Of course, be careful with copyrighted images and make sure which license you use for those images to avoid problems. In conclusion, it is not enough to upload beautiful images on your website, but you need to properly SEO images so that they appear in search engines. Don’t forget to work on SEO for your photos.
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