Images are a vital part of any website. They can be used to help optimize your site for search engines, as well as make it more visually appealing. In this blog post, we will go over 3 simple steps that you can take in order to optimize images for SEO and create a better user experience.
How Image SEO Benefits You
Having properly optimized images allows you to get even more traffic to your website. Google’s image search can pick up the images you have embedded in your posts. Having optimized images will increase your chance of them showing up in Google’s search.
In addition, including good quality images in blog posts may help improve the user experience and encourage more clicks to your site. Furthermore, you should optimize all new images that are added to a post so they don’t continue adding weight to an older post’s load time.
1. Optimize your image file name
When uploading an image file name on the upload screen, try including keywords that would best describe what is happening in the photo or naming it after the subject matter in some way.
This helps when Google crawls through thumbnails looking for suitable results for certain web pages—they know they’re coming across something about photography if they see “DSC_0001” instead of “Eiffel Tower on a rainy day”.
Name your images based on what they represent. This allows you to optimize your page content for search engines, as well as make it easy for users to find the right file.
Use keywords that are relevant and specific.
Don’t use a long filename with lots of numbers or symbols in order to optimize image file names.
2. Include keywords in the alt tags
Including keywords in your alt tag description will optimize your images for search engines.
This is also beneficial because it gives people who can’t see the image an idea of what they are looking at, and this improves their user experience.
I recommend including about three to four keywords in order to optimize images both for humans and for search engines as well as provide more relevant information within the description text so that those viewing the image have a better understanding of its contents without needing to click on it or view all the details within it themselves.
3. Add descriptive text/captions to your images
Adding captions to your image helps to add context and a little more information to the image, which is useful for those viewing the images. It also helps optimize your page for search engines and can significantly improve SEO rankings with just one small change!
Search engines can also index captions from your images as keywords if there isn’t anything more descriptive in the search engine’s cache about the contents of an image – this means adding captions not only improves SEO rankings but also increases website traffic because people who didn’t know what was pictured now have context with which to make decisions on whether or not they want to view it!
Bonus Tip 1: Optimize File Size to Improve Load Times
Some additional things you should remember to optimize your images for seo are the file size of the image, which is most effectively done by using a compression plugin or editing within Photoshop.
Bonus Tip 2: Use Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a technique used on websites to optimize load time. It loads images in the background after a user scrolls down so they’re not waiting for images to load upfront before seeing any content.
This saves the user from having to load everything on a page, and it saves your website from loading content that may never be viewed if the user leaves the page.