Optimizing Your Images for SEO

The image is an often overlooked aspect of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Anyone who has ever made a piece of content for the web has found themselves wondering if their work needs an image. Well, the short answer is yes. Almost every type of web content will perform better on search engines if it has an image. So, spend time thinking about how you can optimize your images for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Your image use can take your content even further. Let’s talk about how you can optimize your images for better search engine performance.

Step 1 – Pick the Right Image

Before optimizing your SEO images, you must find appropriate images for your content. As a general rule of thumb, it is better to use your pictures than images from stock photo websites (but stock photos will work fine if you don’t have other options). Other choices for images to use in your content include:

• Drawings/animated characters
• Animated Gifs
• Charts and graphs
• And infographics

When picking your image(s), ensure it relates to the content you are creating. For example, having a picture of parakeets doesn’t do any good if you’re writing a page for a plumbing website!

Step 2 – Use the Right Image File Format

There are a few different image file formats, each better suited for specific images. The formats and their general best-practice uses include:

• JPEG/JPG – Jpegs are best used for real-life photographs as several more colors are available. They are also suitable for large-scale graphics.
• PNG – PNG images are best used to preserve the transparency of the image’s background.
• SVG – SVGs are best used for logos and icons to be scaled to several resolutions.

Step 3 – Compress Your Images

Once you have found the right image and transcoded it to the correct file type for its use, it’s time to compress the picture on the web. But why?

Well, the faster your image loads, the better your page will perform in search. Page speed is a significant factor for ranking on Google and other search engines. So, work on getting your images to load as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.

When compressing your images, you want to find a tool that does not cause a visible loss of quality. A couple of decent tools to use are TinyJPG and TinyPNG. Those sites will losslessly compress your images for optimum web load times.

Step 4 – Make Sure to Use Alt-Attribute Text on Your Image(s)

Alt-attribute text is a tag added to web images that tells screen-reading programs what a picture is for the vision-impaired. The goal is to make all of the content on your page accessible to anyone and everyone without losing any of the information you’re trying to present.

Alt-attribute text is one of those areas of SEO that many people forget about. However, the alt-attribute text is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization. So, before you publish your next web page or blog post, ensure you have used appropriate alt-attribute text for your images. For an example of what that looks like, see the screenshot below.

Conclusion

Optimizing your images for SEO isn’t complicated or time-consuming. However, performing the four steps listed above can go a long way toward helping your page achieve well on search engines like Google. If you’d like help optimizing the images on your website, please get in touch with us here at Contractor Advertising today!