SEO Tips For Website Images
Images are a great way to engage visitors and are used on every website, ideally on every page. A website image can be a logo, something to simply break up paragraphs of text, or an engaging piece of media for users. However, images can also be used for more ‘hidden’ advantages and functions for this. A properly SEO optimised image can help your website rank better as well as your images ranking for image search results, such as Google Images. In this blog, I’ll cover some tips for properly SEO optimising your website images to see these results.
Use original, high-quality images
Original and high-quality images are always preferred by search engines in place of over-used stock images, no matter how much you optimise your stock images. Images are apart of your content. Just as content, search engines give extra marks for originality and freshness. Original images are also more engaging to users and better for them than just seeing the same stock images on different websites.
Use small file sizes
An important part of SEO in the design element is the speed of your website. People want pages to load as fast as possible, so naturally, search engines will give people what they want: fast-loading websites. Images with large file sizes can easily stack up and cause your webpage to load slowly, as users have to download each file present on a page. An easy way to keep the file size of an image low is to ensure you are only using necessary resolutions. For instance, downloading a 4K Ultra HD image only to display it on the website as a 500 x 500 image is bad practice. Instead, resize the image to the required resolution and then upload that image to your website. Another best practice is to use JPEG files when possible. JPEG format uses lossy compression, which means the image is compressed to keep the file size small however the quality is reduced each time this happens. The reduction in quality isn’t noticeable and shouldn’t be a problem anyway.
Use detailed image captions
Image captions are text which appears around the image, usually at the bottom. Captions in addition to ALT tags can provide search engine crawlers additional context to the image, so crawlers actually know what the image is about and how relevant it is to the content. In addition to aiding search engines, according to Poynter Research, image captions see up to 16% more readership than normal text content.
Optimise file names
In addition to alt tags, another part of an image that should be SEO optimised is the file name itself to provide as much keyword-rich context for search engines as you can. Best practices include having your keyword in your saved file name, with dashes (-) used instead of spaces to allow for easy reading for both users and search engine crawlers. The optimised file names should include your keyword but still be relevant to what the actual image is.
Blue Whale Media’s SEO Marketing Service
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