SEO Image Optimization
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Images and SEO are two web design concepts that not a lot of brands realize match exceptionally well.
Typically, we might associate SEO with other elements – content creation, link building, user experience, auditing, local citations, and more.
Image optimization is a service we offer as a part of our SEO package that more than warrants inclusion in amongst these components. Image optimization will make your content more visible on search engines, in addition to making your website more accessible and attractive to users.
As SEO experts, our team knows that it is important to use every tool available to strengthen your site’s authority and quality in the eyes of search engines. As we utilize image optimization across your site, in combination with other techniques, get ready to watch your web pages climb search engine rankings and see the clicks you start to earn
What Is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is a multi-step process to ensure your images are rendered in a high-quality format and correctly optimized.
A part of this is ensuring your images are rendered in the ideal format, size, and resolution for the user. Another aspect is labeling images with metadata so that search engines can read the images, understand their context, and properly classify them in image search.
Images also play a key role in website performance. On average, images make up a fifth or more of a page’s total weight. Image size and complexity impact how a page performs. To this point, our image optimization experts will do what we can to reduce the size of your images with no compromise to quality. This will improve page load times and user experience thus further boosting your search engine rankings and improving key metrics, such as engagement, conversions, and user retention.
Benefits Of Image Optimization
- Improves page load time.
- Reduces infrastructure costs on websites that have a lot of images.
- Enhances the user experience, no matter what device they are viewing the image on.
- Improves your SEO.
Some sites have hundreds, if not thousands of images. No matter your industry, optimizing your images is essential for the user experience and your SEO. Images that make your site slow, that don’t have enough description to them, or that aren’t properly sized and rendered are going to negatively impact site presentation and performance.
Through our SEO image optimization, we ensure your site has all the right tools in place to produce real results.
An Image Audit Will Reveal How Your Images Are Performing
Before we begin on image optimization, we do an image optimization audit where we can see all sorts of data image by image. This includes file size, name, metadata, indexability, and more.
Moving past the technical elements of images, we can also analyze how they are performing on Google Search. This includes clicks, impressions, click-through rate, queries, pages, countries, and devices.
After we have completed this audit, our SEO team can move forward. In optimizing images and launching an image optimization SEO campaign, we can then track how images are performing after we execute these strategies.
It is key to note that search engine algorithms are always changing as is the technology used to rank websites. With the introduction of various AI products targeting image search and reverse image service, it’s clear that image optimization is going to play a much larger role in SEO over the next decade. There is no reason to wait to set yourself up for success as it relates to how your images are presented, coded, and identified.
Businesses That Can Benefit From Image Optimization
Any small business website is going to host images. There is no website that does not incorporate images into their design.
While every website should have SEO image optimization in place, in our experience, here are some examples of types of websites that can benefit the most from all that we bring.
eCommerce Websites
If you are selling products online, customers are going to want to see high-quality, in-depth images and graphics. A lot of eCommerce sites easily end up with hundreds of photos that each need to be correctly optimized.
Contractor Websites
If you are a construction company or are a general contractor, locksmith, plumber, or do similar work, your website is an opportunity to show off your work. For this showcase, image optimization will be key to ensuring your portfolio doesn’t overwhelm load times.
Realtor Websites
A real estate agent or realtor website that has property listings and community information uses a lot of images. Let’s optimize those.
News Websites
Any sort of current events or news websites has a consistent format of text plus images or video. As articles are published quickly, it is imperative that images are correctly optimized. The amount of images on such a site can add up quickly.
How We Do Image Optimization
Resize Images
Image size refers to the dimension of the image. For higher resolution and larger dimensions, these can often be scaled down and resized without any discernible loss in quality.
Compressing Images
How images are compressed affects file size and quality. Our team will ensure your images are properly compressed and verify that the image is not of poor quality, utilizing the best in image compression software.
Ideal File Size For Images
The ideal file size for a website image is 100Kb or under wherever possible. This isn’t always possible, however, it’s what we strive to achieve with every image.
Enable Lazy Loading
Lazy loading for below-the-fold images can enhance load time and website performance in a significant way. It allows a page to load in full while off-screen images only start to present once a visitor scrolls down and has it on their screen.
Optimize Image Names
Every image should have a relevant, keyword-rich name with target keywords separated by hyphens. No underscores. A clear and descriptive title will ensure search engine crawlers understand what the image is they are reading.
Utilizing Alt Tags
Alt tags allow search engines to index your image content accurately. As search engines cannot interpret an image, they rely on elements such as an alt tag to provide context clues, similar to the image name.
Consider Unique Images
While stock photos may be all you have at certain times, they won’t help your SEO because they aren’t unique to you. For this reason, we advocate for uploading unique images, whether they are photos or graphics.
Mobile-Responsive Images
As many search engines index mobile-first and the vast majority of Internet users are on mobile devices, it’s imperative to have images that are mobile-friendly. This ensures they are resized appropriately to the site layout.
Add Structured Data To Images
Google Image supports structured data for product images, videos, and recipes. The use of structured data will also help search engines display your images as rich results.
Submit An Image Sitemap
Under Google SEO best practices for image optimization, they advocate for submitting an image sitemap. This provides the search engine URLs for all images on your website, ensuring each is scanned and none are missed.
Ensure Images Are Properly Hosted
We will verify to make sure images are hosted on your domain or subdomain. This helps with link equity if anyone is embedding the image into their content, cache control, branding, and control over redirects. In some cases, we may recommend a content delivery network (CDN) if it is a strategy we believe can speed up load times.
Image File Type
JPEGs are considered more SEO-friendly than PNGs and are the preferred image file type in image optimization, especially if there are no transparent backgrounds involved. Comparatively, logos and high-resolution graphics are best saved as an SVG while GIFs are used for simple animations that do not require wide color scales.
Use Of Captions
Image captions do not directly impact SEO, however, when used appropriately, they can indirectly have a positive effect when they improve user experience and engagement.
Optimize Images For Search Engines With Your SEO Experts At All The Way Up Media
Every web page on your server needs image optimization if you intend to get the most from your SEO.
Whether it’s a blog, eCommerce site, contractor site, non-profit site, or small business site, images will bring your pages to life and positively impact your search engine rank when they are coded correctly. At All The Way Up Media, we can assist in ensuring you find the right images for your site and that they are optimized for SEO.
As you’ll discover post-image optimization, the results are real and they are waiting. This type of approach to images will help users understand your pages better, improve a wide variety of on-site metrics, and motivate healthy momentum in your search engine rankings.
While image optimization is not the only SEO strategy we use, it’s central to the grand scope of an SEO campaign. It helps to illustrate exactly what your brand represents – literally! These images can also be carried over into social media marketing campaigns and more.
There is a massive opportunity here to use image optimization to further your online marketing objectives and business goals.
Connect with the best in SEO at All The Way Up Media to find out more on how we can image-optimize your website.
