How to Optimize Images

How to Optimize Images (Best & Effective Tips)

We all know the importance of SEO in the virtual world. Without doing an effective SEO you cannot expect your site to get ranked in Google. Producing high-quality content, top-notch web links, and many other things to implement SEO on you may go in vain if you ignore Image optimization.

One of the ways to get ranked in Google is by optimizing your images. Image optimization is the combination of efforts to get images ranked in Google. You can adopt many ways to optimize images. Implementing keywords, providing site maps, giving a title, alt tags are some of the ways. Editing images is also a significant way to optimize your images.

However, there are many other ways to optimize images to drive web traffic. In this article, I will discuss some of the best ways to optimize images to get the best result.

Why Optimize Images?

Why should you care about optimizing images when you are already doing overall optimization on your website. Well, if you are implementing general SEO on your website, that’s great. But you have to consider optimizing images as well. When we analyze the reasons why we should optimize images, we find two major reasons why you should optimize your images.

  • It can drive your web traffic with a huge number of organic visitors. Google has eliminated the option to view images, so the visitor will land directly on your website.
  • Optimizing images allows the auto-optimization of screen readers. So, the visitor will understand the website better.

Optimization Images Tips

Now that you know why you should care about Google image optimization, let’s jump in the ways to optimize your images so that you can generate more traffic on your website.

01. Knowing Your Key Phrases Well

Keyword - Optimize image

Never waste your time in vain. Research your focus key phrase, and keywords well. You must search for the words people use to locate your virtual presence. Once you are confident about your keywords, it will be easier for you to optimize images. Because you know which keyword to put on the title, alt tags, or in the caption of your images.

On the other hand, remaining clueless about the keywords will be a negative point for your website and business. As a result, you cannot have good feedback from the images of your website.

02. Naming Images for SEO

Following the best practices of SEO while naming your images will give you an excellent result. You can never be convinced by the automatic name you get from a camera while shooting a picture. The name your camera gives is nothing but a serial number. This cannot be an ideal name. So, you must select a name that represents the subject and its activities.

In fact, the name should represent the content your image has. Try to put a relevant keyword on the name of the image. You cannot just go for a random name. Keep the keywords in mind while selecting a name for the images.

03. Including Sitemaps for Images

site map - Optimize image

Search engines are unable to read the visuals. That means they cannot understand what is on the image unless you put additional information about the images. So, put the maximum number of clues so that the images can be read by the search engine.

Google suggests providing sitemaps as the best practice to publish images on your website. You should follow the instructions given by Google to implement SEO on your images. Otherwise, your aim to rank well will go in vain.

04. Optimizing Image Alt Tags (Optimize Images)

You may ask, can search engines read the text in images? The answer is “no”. Search engines cannot recognize the images of the human brain, complicated diagrams, and images like this. They have to process the images from the alt tags. Alt tags help search engines to recognize and process the image.

So, you should include some keywords on the alt tag so that it can be easily processed by the search engines.

Moreover, not every user can see the images of your websites. You can make your website user-friendly for those users. Keeping this in mind, you should optimize the alt tags of images.

05. Title Tags (Optimize Images)

As a step of implementing a perfect SEO on your images, besides providing alt tags you should also add title tags as well. Well, you might get confused between these two. Title tags do not show themselves in the place of invisible pictures.

Title tags also help the user to understand what is on the image. When the user will hover the mouse cursor on the image then they will see the title tags and comprehend the image subject. The title tag does not necessarily have to be keywords. You can use title tags as a caption to provide further explanation about the photo.

06. Editing Image

Well, it is one of the most ignored ways of optimizing images. Editing images has many steps in general. Google gives priority to faster-loading websites while ranking. You can resize your images using Photoshop. Or you can just compress the photo. Some common image editing methods that help in image optimization.

  • Color correction

If you are puzzled about editing images, then Clipping World is there to give you high-quality image editing services. Here you will get everything related to graphics design.

07. Writing Body Content (Optimize Images)

Well, alt tags are an important source of knowing the image. However, no one writes an alt tag into detail that it tells everything about the image. For this reason, it becomes impossible for the search engine to understand the image. So, you have to write body content. The content you will write on your pages will give the images a relevant context.

For instance, after shooting a wedding you should not upload the files randomly. Write separate blog posts for each photo or a group of photos and upload them on the site.

In short, tell the story of the image on the body content. As a result, you will easily get ranked higher.

08. Do Not Hide Your Text

If you hide your text with any image, it will be considered as a black-hat SEO technique. You may want to use an image instead of a text on the header on H1. Avoid this practice. Google might punish you for this. When you need to use an image as H1 then you have to label the image properly. Otherwise, you cannot reap the advantages of image SEO.

09. Try Different Image Formats

Image formats - Optimize image

Well, this tip may make you feel like laughing if you are a newbie in the world of SEO. But let me assure you different image formats matter. No matter how careless you are about the file format, it matters when it comes to client-oriented web building.

The user or visitors of your website care about the file format whether it is GIF, PNG, or JPEG. Different files take different amounts of space. So, while uploading photos consider a variety in file formats. Well, you can change the file format anytime using online free tools.

10. Share Your Images

Share your image

Your site should have many links from high authority sites so that it becomes easy to get ranked. To get this done you should share the images on different social media platforms. People don’t love to read long texts, rather they love visual content. If you share your original images on social sites, it will increase the number of links. As a result, your probability of getting ranked will be higher than before.

Final Verdict on Image Optimization

You can adopt many SEO tactics to improve rank in Google. However, Google image SEO is one of the most effective and result-oriented steps. Within a very short time, you can improve your position in Google, though image optimization itself is a little time-consuming task. An optimized image will increase your reputation as well. I hope now you are convinced why you should care about optimizing images and how to do it.