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Optimize Images for Web & SEO
Learn All About Image Optimization for Search Engines & How to Rank Images for SEO
Are you struggling to get your images to rank in search? If yes, then you are not alone. Understanding image optimization for SEO is a common problem for many businesses.
Today’s web is a visual one. Images are the most popular form of content on the internet. Images optimized for SEO drive traffic more than any other form of content. As per Google, image search on mobile has increased by 60%. That makes images a significant source of information for those visually searching across search engines.
Images are essential in helping users find information and grow trust in your brand. However, if there is any error while optimizing web images, your SEO ranking will get hurt. To make sure your images stand out in today’s cut-throat search engine world, optimize them for visibility.
Image Optimization for SEO: Summary
Image optimization in SEO is about making your content visible across the net and all social platforms. You do this by ensuring that every image you use for SEO has all the correct tags and alt attributes so Google and other search engines can index it properly. When creating images for SEO, you also want to consider size, file type, resolution, and source.
This blog will go through everything you need to know about optimizing images for web & SEO. From how Google indexes images to what file formats work best for SEO images and which text attributes can help you rank. Quattr's SEO image optimization guide has everything you need to know about SEO for images.
Here is our ultimate guide to optimizing your imagery for search engine crawlers.
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What is SEO Image Optimization?
SEO image optimization means configuring images on a web page to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Optimizing images for SEO improves your website’s visibility and drives more traffic to your pages.
When you optimize images for SEO, you are optimizing the image’s filename, file type, alt text, and overall size to index correctly by search engines like Google. You are verifying the images have the proper tags so that Google can understand your site visuals. Finally, ensure your efforts keep your site’s load times quick.
Why Optimize Images for Web?
Optimizing images for the web is essential to ensuring your web pages are loading quickly and efficiently. With the correct workflow, you can easily optimize the size and file type of your images for the web. Doing so will reduce the bandwidth used, create faster backups, and require less storage space on your server.
In addition to improving your website's performance, image optimization will also help with your SEO, as search engines prefer pages that load quickly. Optimizing your images ensures your site is crawled and indexed faster for Google Image Search.
When you optimize images for SEO, you also improve your click-through rate. Images that appear at the top of search engine results are more eye-catching and easier to click. The click-through rate of your images increases when they are easy to find.
Optimizing images for web performance is one of the simplest (yet often overlooked) things to get the most out of your website. So remember to optimize images for web and take advantage of the many benefits it has to offer. Following a few simple steps ensures your website runs faster and more efficiently, increasing your SEO rankings and traffic.
Optimized images can appear in Google Images with a more detailed description to ensure that your images stand out from the rest. High-ranking Google images help draw attention to your website while increasing your chances of making it to the top of the search engine’s results page. Read the latest Google image SEO best practices.
How to Optimize Images for Web?
We have understood what image optimization is for SEO and why it is essential. The next question is how you do it. Image optimization for SEO has various aspects. In the sections below, we discuss how to optimize your imagery for SEO and web.
Optimize Images for Web Performance & Speed
When you optimize your images for speed, you ensure that your images are not slowing down your site, especially on mobile. Google might penalize you for having a slow-loading website. Google image optimization has its own rules. However, you also want to ensure your images are engaging, well-branded, and optimized.
Some things to remember with image optimization for speed include image file size, image format, and image caching. Here are some standard practices to reduce image sizing and ensure faster loading of web pages for your visitors.
Size your images correctly
A file’s size determines how fast it loads. A larger asset size will cause a slower load time, frustrating users. Your SEO image size is a significant contributor to page bloat if un-optimized. In particular, with WordPress websites.
Sizing your images correctly leads to better website page loads. Large images can take a long time to load, frustrating your website’s visitors.
You should resize images to the size you need. If you have a high resolution, you are juicing capacity and loading time with the extra data.
Another way to reduce the size of your images is to use the correct image dimensions. If you don’t need the full resolution of an image, then use a smaller size. The image’s standard resolution is 72 pixels per inch (PPI), which is an excellent target.
Finally, avoid using high-resolution images. Many high-resolution images are unnecessary and can slow down your website. If you don’t need the high resolution, use a lower-resolution image.
Use compression tools & lazy load images
Simple resizing images is not enough; you must also compress them. There are several different compression tools that you can use, such as jpegoptim, optipng, and Squoosh. These tools will reduce the size of your images without significantly affecting the quality.
Another way to reduce the size of your images is to use lazy loading. With lazy loading, images are not loaded until they are needed. This can reduce your pages' size and improve your website's performance.
Use the right file format
You should also use the right file format for your images. You should use JPEG files for photos, and for line art or logos, you should use PNG files. SVG files can also be used for line art and logos, but they are not as widely supported as PNG files. The other common file format used for web images are GIF and WEBp. The table below shows the pros and cons of each file format.
Optimizing Images for Web with Alt Text
Alt text or alternative text is the textual material that shows on a web page instead of an image if the image does not load on the user's screen. Alt text is a simple description of the picture that enables search engines to scan and rank your website, making it more visible to potential customers.
One significant advantage of alt text is its function in assisting visually challenged users who use screen-reading software to interpret information.
Ensuring your alt text is informative and correct contributes to an optimized image for the web and leads to faster web page loading.
Here are some pointers for including alt text in your images:
1. All non-decorative photos should have alt text.
2. Keep it concise and descriptive. Image alt text should be keyword rich to help improve your website’s search engine ranking.
3. In the text, avoid using phrases like "picture of" or "photo of"; explain what the visitor will see instead.
4. Consider if the page would be equally understandable if the visuals were replaced with text equivalents.
5. Ensure the alt text for linked photos conveys the action that will occur when the visitor clicks.
Image Optimization for SEO with Structured Data
Optimizing images for the web and SEO can help search engines display your images as rich results. Image optimization for SEO can also help your web pages appear with more details on search engine results pages. Structured data is one of the essential elements in improving image search results. When used correctly, Google can add a badge to your images showing that they belong to a particular product or organization.
Structured data adds metadata to your webpage, which allows search engines to understand the content of an image better. To ensure your efforts to optimize images for web & SEO with structured data are successful, Google suggests following their structured data guidelines. It includes specifying an image as a structured data property, providing the image that belongs to the instance of that type, and ensuring the images are crawlable and indexable. If done correctly, you can achieve a more fleshed-out listing in Google Image Search. Please read our guide on structured data and learn how to add structured data for images.
Image Optimization for SEO: File Name
When optimizing them for SEO, giving your images the correct file name is crucial. By doing so, you are helping to provide Google and other search engines with the information they need to rank your images correctly.
When choosing a file name for your image, keep the following in mind:
1. The file name should accurately reflect the contents of the image.
2. The file name should be brief but descriptive.
3. The file name should include keywords relevant to the image.
4. The file name should be different for each image. However if using the same image on multiple pages, keep a cosistent name.
Following these tips will help you optimize your image filenames for SEO.
Social Card Image Optimization
Social card and Google image SEO are some of the latest techniques in SEO. It simply means that you are optimizing the images you use on your social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and your website. Maximize the viewing potential you receive by optimizing your images for SEO.
You can do a few things to ensure we optimize you for social media and search engines. The first thing you should do is to make sure the images you upload are the correct size.
For Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites, you will want to use images that are 1600px by 900px or smaller. You can use a tool like “Image Size” to help determine the correct size for your images. Always use the valid file format. You will want to use JPEG or PNG files for social media sites.
Additionally, you can use the correct keywords in your image file name and the alt text for your image.
Finally, you can also utilize the Open Graph and Twitter Cards. With Open Graph, you can customize the preview title, image, and more for social posts on platforms like Facebook and Pinterest. For Facebook and Pinterest, you need to add the mentioned code in the <head> section.
<meta property="og:image" content="http://site.com/image-link.jpg" />
For Twitter, you can add Twitter cards that summarize your content. For Twitter, you need to add the mentioned code in the <head> section.
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary"></meta>
These SEO best practices will help you speed up on-page traffic.
Optimize Image for Web with CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) can help your images and other content to load quickly. They provide servers in different locations worldwide, allowing content to be rapidly distributed and available to a wide area. For example, if you are in the U.S., accessing content stored on a U.S. server is much quicker than pulling content from a server based in Asia.
A CDN can also help reduce the loading time of images, by caching them on different servers around the world and delivering them from the closest server. It can also help compress the size of an image, by converting it to a lighter format like JPEG or WebP. Additionally, a CDN can also help improve the performance of an image on different platforms or devices, by delivering the best image format for each one.
SEO Image Sitemap
An image sitemap is critical for domains. It provides for the graphics of the domain proper indexing by search engines. It is beneficial because images indexed by search engines are more likely to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches for images related to the domain.
An image sitemap can also enhance the user experience in a domain, allowing users to navigate quickly to the images they seek.
There are a few ways to create an image sitemap. One way is to use a tool such as XML Sitemaps, a free online tool that allows users to create XML sitemaps.
Another way to create an image sitemap is to use a plugin for a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress. For example, a WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO allows users to create and submit an image sitemap to search engines.
It is essential to include as many images on the domain as possible. Image sitemaps ensure that someone correctly tagged the images with the correct keywords and metadata. Keeping the image sitemap live and up to date is a great practice.
SEO Best Practices for Optimizing Images for the Web
When optimizing images for web, here are some basic best practices:
1. Employ a CDN to offer your photographs quickly to visitors worldwide.
2. Delete any extraneous picture data.
3. Trim the white area and reconstruct it using CSS to provide the padding.
4. Upload the photographs in the appropriate sizes.
5. Instead of inserting text within photos, use web fonts; they appear better when resized and take up less space.
6. Where feasible, use lossless compression.
7. If you require animation, use GIF.
8. If you want excellent detail and resolution, choose PNG.
9. For general photographs and screenshots, use JPG.
10. In some circumstances, lazy-loading pictures may be desirable for speedier first-page rendering.
Scale Image Optimization for Website with Quattr
A website’s images play an essential role in SEO, but if they aren’t optimized properly, they can slow it down and affect the user experience. Quattr is an SEO platform that can help you quickly and easily optimize your website's images, making your site faster and easier to use.
With Quattr, you can quickly optimize your images for web use by gaining visibility of what SEO image assets are pulling down the page speed scores across your entire website. You can review these errors within Quattr’s performance recommendations and optimize them at scale instead of optimizing images for one page at a time.
You can also optimize your images’ alt text for top keyword clusters using the Quattr platform. Quattr's keyword recommendation identifies top keyword clusters your page can rank for and suggests adding top user queries into your alt text of image assets on the page. Quattr's sandbox environment lets you test these changes. The changes are scored based on our AI+ML models built to review content on the page like a search engine.
Looking for a fast-track solution to SEO image optimization?
Get StartedImage Optimization for Web & SEO FAQs
What is Image Optimization SEO?
Image optimization SEO ensures that your website's images are correctly optimized for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. This includes optimizing image file size, filename, Alt text, caption, title, and description while ensuring that the image is appropriately responsive and optimized for page load speed.
Why Optimize Image for Web?
Optimizing image for web helps keep the website’s page size small so it can load faster. Additionally, it plays a vital role in increasing organic search traffic, and improving the user experience.
How to optimize your images for visual search?
Optimizing images for visual search involves utilizing image optimization tools to ensure that images are correctly compressed and sized while tagging them with relevant keywords. Additionally, make sure to add relevant metadata (alt text) to each image that explains the image content.
About The Author
About Quattr
Quattr is an innovative and fast-growing venture-backed company based in Palo Alto, California USA. We are a Delaware corporation that has raised over $7M in venture capital. Quattr's AI-first platform evaluates like search engines to find opportunities across content, experience, and discoverability. A team of growth concierge analyze your data and recommends the top improvements to make for faster organic traffic growth. Growth-driven brands trust Quattr and are seeing sustained traffic growth.
