7 Tips for Website Image Optimization – number 6 is the best! Eye-opening blog!

Are you seeking a competitive advantage in SEO?

You could be losing out on traffic, user engagement, and sales if your image optimization isn’t up to par.

While deciding which website to rank for a specific search query, Google considers over 200 variables. While having a well-optimized image will not help you rank first for subpar content, it will assist you to stand out from other sites that do not optimize their images.

What’s the good news? Automate Image optimization isn’t all that difficult. With only a few tweaks to your current image approach, you could see an increase in traffic and leads, as well as sales.

Well-optimized images are more visible in Google, resulting in increased traffic. The most crucial reason for sites to optimize their pictures is for SEO purposes, but there are numerous other advantages as well:

● Enhance user experience: Make your site easier to explore; well-optimized photos that appear correctly boost UX. For example, large images can fill the entire screen or obscure other items on the page.

● Site speed: When it comes to SEO, site speed is crucial. Improperly formatted images can cause your site to load slowly, reducing your ranking & distracting your site users.

● Increases the accessibility of your website: Few SEO actions, such as adding image alt tags, can help screen readers navigate your site smoothly. Web accessibility is good not just for site visitors but also for SEO.

While image optimization may appear to be just another step in the never-ending effort to improve SEO, it may greatly influence rankings and user experience.

How can you ensure that graphics aren’t slowing down your website?

Let us help you optimise your website images.

Technical SEO is sometimes challenging, especially if you are not quite familiar with the most recent Google algorithm changes. On the brighter side, website image optimization isn’t as tricky as other SEO components, and it doesn’t appear to change as frequently.

Are you ready to ensure that your photos aid your SEO efforts? Here’s everything you need to know about it.

1. Select the Correct Image File Format

Using the wrong picture file type can result in your photos being displayed wrongly, looking blurry, and even affecting whether or not users can see them. However, there are other image types to choose from, including vectors, JPEGs, raster, PNG, and GIFs.

Which image format is the most SEO-friendly? In general, JPEGs or PNGs are the best options.

JPEG stands for Joint Photographics Expert Group and is a standard image file format. They may be viewed on almost any device and can display millions of colors, ensuring that the color of your photographs is preserved. JPEGs use lossy compression, which means some data is lost during compression, making them unsuitable for professional photography. They are, nevertheless, perfect for featured photographs in blog articles and other comparable images.

PNG is another standard picture format that can be viewed on almost any device. These employ lossless compression, ensuring that no data is lost during the compression process. Transparent backgrounds and other components are also supported. The file sizes, on the other hand, are typically substantially bigger.

These are the most widely used photographs on the internet. When I propose employing them, it’s as follows:

JPEGs are ideal for photos in blog posts, screenshots, and other similar applications. The smaller size will help maintain site speed, and most images will be clear enough. Switch to PNG format if the quality isn’t good enough, but your site’s speed is good.

PNGs are ideal for icons, logos, and images that may be zoomed in. PNG images are more extensive but have slightly better quality. Use a PNG file when image quality is essential.

Other image types, particularly GIFs, should be avoided on your website. I enjoy a good GIF, but they do slow down your site.

2. Compress Your Photographs

Image compression reduces the size of huge image files, making them easier to upload to the internet or save on your device. When done correctly, image compression finds the ideal balance between size and image quality.

Lossy and lossless compression are the two types of picture compression. JPEGs use lossy compression, which throws out some of the data, while lossless compression keeps all of it. (As I previously stated, PNGs use lossless compression.)

As a result, the image type determines the compression you apply.

An example of compressed images is as follows:

Compress Your Images – best wordpress image optimization plugin Tips for Your Website

The image on the far left is 1MB in size, so it’s relatively big. The middle image is nearly identical (there is a minor amount of graininess in the background if you look closely), but it is much smaller at 190KB. The third is even smaller, and in webp format and it’s as small as 69KB.

Strive for the perfect mix of size and quality.

When choosing how much to compress your images, think about your end-user. In maximum cases, they are unlikely to care if an image on a blog post is a tiny bit less crisp. However, if you send a client a new logo, that’s a different story.

Use the compression types based on the file format you use and select the file format depending on how that image shall be used.

Now, how do you compress the images? There are several tools available for that.

I like the app extension called resizing.app, it’s a free Chrome extension that helps you convert file formats, crop images, and resize images in just one click. Other online image compression tools include tinypng.com and imagecompressor.com

3. Add Image Description Alt Text/tag

Image Alt text (aka, alternative text) is a description written for an image that describes what the image is about and what purpose it serves. Screen readers use this data to describe an image to the users, and Google uses it to find out whether an image is relevant to a search query.

If you use WordPress, adding alt text is very simple. Just highlight the block with an image and add the alt text to the provided box, like this:

In Google Docs, right-click on images, click Alt text, and a box that allows you to add the image alt text/tag.

What do you write as your image alt text/tag? Although it’s up to you, here’s the formula we commonly use:

“Main keyword – description of image”:

For the image above from WordPress, We used “image optimization guide image alt text/tag in the WordPress example.” This format makes sure that the screen readers know what the image is about and notifies Google that the image is relevant to image optimization wordpress plugin search queries.

Pro-tip for you—if you want to see how your competitors are using alt texts, navigate to their site, right-click and select “Inspect.” You’ll see the alt tags in the image code of their site.

4. Write High-Quality Image Names and Image Descriptions

Image title helps users (also search engines) with more context about your images. While they don’t impact ranking (John Muller), they provide a bit more context & they show up in site code.

We recommend using a short phrase that describes the image and the key term the post targets—similar to your image alt text/tag.

It can also make your images easier to find in Google image search as Google generates a title and snippet for images. If you include a title, they’ll consider that.

5. Ensure your site Images Are Mobile-Friendly

If you’ve used the correct file type along with proper image compression, they should be mobile-friendly enough. Although, sometimes, things don’t always result in the way we expect them to be.

As we know, the majority of internet traffic comes from mobile devices, so you have to ensure that your site images don’t affect the mobile experience negatively.

For that reason, we strongly recommend viewing your site from different mobile devices to ensure the images look the best. Remember, different devices come with different screen resolutions, and they appear differently when you view content on them.

6. Use of Schema Markup

Schema mark-up, or more commonly known as website structured data, is a type of code that assists search engines in understanding the data flow of your page/content.

Schema mark-up formats your data so Google can understand if it’s a list, a recipe, an image, and so forth. Here’s what it looks like:

Image Optimization SEO Tips for Your Website – Use Schema Markup

Schema.org lists out three different types of image schemas, which includes:

● layout Image

● logo

● photo

This is more of a technical change, so don’t get worried if this feels difficult. Schema.org mentions the coding you can use to include structured data on your images here.

7. Optimize your Image File Names

According to Google, the search engine uses the URL path and the file name to understand any images better. It means you should organize your image URLs logically & include key terms in your file names.

This can help you stay organized & help Google understand your images: a complete win.

File names don’t have to be complicated. We usually use the image alt text as the file name, making it easier to manage and add posts to the website.

We recommend using the keyword in the file name that describes the image.

Conclusion: Image Optimization

Google gives us a lot of information about optimizing our sites and our images. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the small details.

There are some really useful WordPress image optimization plugins available. Simply search in the plugin section and you will get the list of it. We will talk about in detail in our future blog.

The tips above will definitely help you make the most of your images; however, We recommend focusing on making sure your images bring value to users. Don’t cram images in just to meet a quota, and don’t add images that don’t make sense for your content.