Kleinburg Brewery
- design
- / web
Optimizing site images is extremely important in order to increase and boost search engine rankings for web pages.
Furthermore, they can encourage readers to stay on your site, convert, sell more products, and more. When it comes to SEO rankings, images can boost a page for the keywords you are trying to rank for. Here are 6 tips to help you optimize your images for a higher search engine ranking.
1. Use Relevant Images
It’s critical that the images you use are relevant to the topic. Images that don’t fit within the content can easily confuse your readers. On the other hand, images that are placed close to relevant text will help your page rank. If your images are not relevant to the topic, they won’t provide the chance to boost SEO value.
2. Use Keywords in the Filename of the Image
Considering the fact that search engines cannot see images, they need to have descriptive text to determine what a specific image contains. It’s critical to rename every image that you choose to include. For instance, search engines won’t be able to identify that an image of a flower is in fact a flower unless you name it as such. The filename tells search engines what the image contains (ie. flower-roses-bouquet.jpg), and provides you with an opportunity to use relevant keywords.
3. Optimize the ‘Alt’ Text of the Image
Alternative text (or ‘alt’ text) provides a description of the subject matter in addition to the image’s relevance to the web page. It is used by search engines to identify what the content of the image file is to decide which images are most suitable to show in response to a user’s search query. For example, an appropriate alt text of an image of a flower with a rainbow in the background could be “A yellow flower with a rainbow in the background”.
4. Use the Appropriate Image File Type
Various types of image files are suitable for a variety of uses. For instance, there are Graphics Interchange Formats (GIF), Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), and Portable Network Graphics (PNG). A huge difference between these is their size and quality. This is an important factor when it comes to SEO as far as how file size impacts page load times.
JPEG files can be compressed without compromising quality, so they’re often used for storing complex images in small file sizes. They do, however, lose quality with multiple edits and saves. The quality of PNG files after multiple saves does not degrade, and can be compressed to a very small size. GIF files are small in size and do not degrade in quality, but they do not support as many colours as JPEGs or PNGs. You might sometimes have to convert your images to different formats, depending on your requirements.
5. Optimizing Site Images by Size
Resizing your image can reduce its width and height, decrease the file size, and shorten page load times. However, certain file formats do not respond that well to being resized, so you might have to crop them before resizing. An image in the appropriate format can be resized prior to being uploaded to WordPress (or any other CMS you use). If you have already added images to your post, you can usually resize them within the CMS you are using.
6. Generate Image Sitemaps
Sitemaps provide search engines with more information about the structure of your site. They can include a list of your web pages, their organization, and the metadata associated with these web pages.
You can also add extensions to your sitemap throughout Google which will allow you to add information about the images, videos, and any news content on your website. Image sitemaps can help you tell Google which images you would like it to crawl and index, as well as help search engines find images it might not have been able to find. If you don’t have an image sitemap, Google offers instructions to create one.
Make good use of your website images to help boost your rankings on search engines!