Any professional writer who creates content for clients, newspapers, or their own business will know how important images are for an article, blog, or survey. 

Images bring the content to life, make it more attractive while contributing to the site’s SEO. They make the content accessible and engaging to readers.  

In this blog, we will try to explain how to optimize your images to make them SEO-friendly. We will share some insight on using images can improve the user experience. 

Gain contextual information for your site and expedite page loading with optimized images to improve search engine rankings.

What is Image SEO? 

The process of creating and delivering high-quality images in the ideal format, size, and resolution to increase user engagement is known as image optimization. This will also include labeling the images precisely so that search engine crawlers can read them and understand the page context for your site. 

According to an article by Yoast, images make up around 21% of a total web page’s weight. This is because images take up more bytes than any other part of a website and complexity influences the site performance. 

Cut the size of images without compromising their quality and you will see the page load times improve and, subsequently, the user experience as well.  

According to an Aberdeen Group study, only a second’s delay in loading time resulted in a 7% drop in conversions, and almost 40% of people abandoned a site that took more than 3 seconds to load.

4 Tips for Image SEO Optimization  

There are some tips and tricks with which you will optimize your existing images to help gain organic traffic through image SEO. We are sharing 4 tips here that will help you quickly optimize existing images for better SEO results and increased page loading speed to gain more organic traffic.

1) Resizing the Images 

Always remember that image size and file size are two different things. Image size is the dimension of an image (as in 1024 by 680 pixels). The file size is the space needed to store it on the server (as in 350 kilobytes). 

High-resolution images created with the professional camera have larger dimensions and will slow down the page load speed. They may be attractive, but scaling down their file size without losing quality will make them work better for your website. 

Visit for more details on best-fit Image size for social media, 

https://www.falcon.io/insights-hub/topics/social-media-management/social-media-images-guides/  

• Pick the correct file format 

Choose from PNG, JPEG, and GIF formats as they have their benefits. Use JPEG for colored images and PNG for simple images. 

You can see the image format for the web is below,

Top 4 Image Formats For The Web

• Choose Appropriate Compression Rate 

Sometimes the SEO executives compress an image too much. This reduces the size but, the image quality becomes very poor. On the contrary, when the compression rate is low, the image quality will remain high but the file size will be huge.  

To solve this problem, you will have to experiment with file types and compression rates and check what works best for each image. Three are many image-editing tools, like Adobe Photoshop that offer the “save for the web” option, which automatically minimizes the file size to optimize image quality for the website.  

Some other Image optimization tools are Pixlr (JPEG optimization), ImageOptim (Mac only), Kraken (bulk compression), JPEG Mini, OptiPNG, etc. 

You may also use some popular WordPress plug-ins for image optimization such as Yoast SEO, ShortPixel, WP Smush, TinyPNG, ImageRecycle, and0020Optimus Image Optimizer.  

After optimizing the images, you will need to recheck if the page loading speed has improved or not.  

There are tools such as WebPageTest, Pingdom, WebWait, or Google PageSpeed Insights to check this.  

Run a regular check for all these parameters at frequent intervals because the site content keeps changing.  

2) Optimize Image File Names 

What happens when you put up an image for Halloween Day and Google reads it as JPG1134? 

It will not recognize it and rank it for the relevant keyword search. 

Choosing the correct file name is necessary for your page SEO and for ranking in image search results. Name the file with relevant, descriptive keywords to get the most SEO range before uploading it. 

Make sure to add targeted keywords as prefixes and separate them with hyphens. Avoid underscores because search engines don’t recognize them. 

“Elements that enhance scanning include headings, large type, bold text, highlighted text, bulleted lists, graphics, captions, topic sentences, and tables of contents.” Yoast 

File names should be sensible for both, search engines and humans. For example, the actual name for an image of a woman at a café is “café134.jpg.” you can rename it in a descriptive way such as “woman-having-a-coffee-in-a-cafe.jpg.” 

Similarly, optimize the image titles. When you use WordPress, the image title is taken from the name of the file so just let it be. In an alternate scenario, rename it with the appropriate keywords just as explained for file names. 

Image titles provide additional context to the alt text and are helpful in terms of user engagement. A brief CTA such as “buy now” or “download today” will work just as well. 

Also read our blog, Top 10 SEO Tools you cannot do without in 2020 

3) Include Captions While using Unique Images 

Image captions are the words directly beneath the images and have a direct impact on SEO. But, unlike file names and alt text, captions are visible on a website page. And that is the reason they add to the user experience. 

Most readers will read the image captions to get a feel of the overall content. Without image captions, bounce rates may increase, damaging credibility with search engine results. 

Use captions for images to create a better user experience (and lower bounce rate), says -Isaac Justesen. 

When it comes to choosing an image, uniqueness does the trick. Using stock photos is ok, but they do not help your search rankings all the time because they are commonly used. Just as unique content works well for SEO, unique images will do the same for the site. 

4) Use Site Maps 

Site maps are files to list the web pages of the website and tell Google and other search engines about the layout of your site content.”  

Simply put they are maps of your site’s content and an important part of SEO as they tell search engines about all the website pages.  

By using a site map for image SEO you tell the search engine crawlers to notice every image, infographic, photo, meme, video thumbnail, etc.  

For image site map entries, you need to include the title, URL location, description, caption, and license information.  

For mapping the video entries, you should include URL location, thumbnail URL, title, description, and raw video file URL. 

If the website is hosted on WordPress, you may use Yoast SEO, which adds your visual content to a site map automatically.  

Final Thoughts  

Image SEO is an important aspect of overall SEO. It is a combination of several elements. As Google gets better at identifying elements in images, it only helps your business to ensure the images that you use, contribute to a better user experience plus the on-page SEO.  

A few points to keep in mind while adding an image to a blog or article: 

• Always use a relevant and unique image to match your text 
• Pick a proper file name for the image 
• Ensure that the image dimensions match the platform norms they are posted on. 
• Reduce file size for faster page loading 
• Add captions for ease of scanning the page 
• Use image alt text  
• Use site maps for mapping all the images, videos, gifs, that are put up on the site 

Remember, images not only contribute to SEO and user experience but also play an important role in the conversion of leads. When visitors see relevant images matching with the content of the site, they can relate better with what they see and make purchasing decisions based on it.  

Hence, image SEO is important for any website’s ranking, and keeping the above-mentioned tips to optimize image SEO will help boost organic traffic to your site. 

Please contact us for any SEO service queries for your business.