In the digital age, optimising images for SEO is a crucial yet often overlooked technique to enhance your website's visibility and performance. High-quality images not only capture your audience's attention but also play a significant role in search engine rankings. By implementing essential techniques for image optimisation, you can ensure faster load times, improved user experience, and higher search engine rankings.
According to Google, images not only need to compliment your content in terms of how they look, but they also need to be the right size and resolution in order to maximise page load speeds. What’s more, attaching metadata and tags to images can help with SEO ranking, providing context to each image for Google’s benefit.
In this article, we’re taking you through some essential techniques to optimise your images for SEO - but first, what is image SEO really about?
Understanding Image SEO
Image SEO means focussing on the quality of your images as well as their format, size, and resolution - all of which contribute towards a great online experience for users, with fast page load speeds and contextual, useful images.
The user experience becomes infinitely better when your images are small but high quality enough to load fast and breathe life into your webpage and content. And that’s not all. Image SEO also emphasises the need for individual tags on each image that you use. This may sound like hard work, but it’s worth it when Google and other search engines start to rank your content higher for relevancy and content quality.
Choosing the Right Image Formats
Selecting the appropriate image format is vital for balancing quality and load speed on your website. Different formats serve different purposes: JPEGs are ideal for photographs and images with complex colours, offering a good balance of quality and file size. PNGs, on the other hand, are perfect for images that require transparency or have text and sharp lines, as they maintain higher quality but tend to have larger file sizes. WebP, a newer format, provides a great compromise, offering superior compression and quality, making it an excellent choice for web use.
Compressing Images for Web Use
Suffice to say, different formats have their benefits and weaknesses - but none of that matters if your image won’t load on a user’s webpage.
Compression allows images to be made into smaller files, ideally without impacting their visual quality. This lets them load more quickly, feeding the modern user's need for instant results and mere seconds of downtime while they wait for a page to load completely.
Photoshop and other editing tools can compress images - but there are several, free, web-based alternatives that can also do the job, such as https://squoosh.app - as well as plugins that can be installed to automatically compress images whenever they are uploaded to your site.
Proper Use of Alt Text
Proper use of alt text is a fundamental aspect of image optimisation that enhances both accessibility and SEO. Alt text, or alternative text, is a brief description of an image that helps search engines understand the content and context of the image, thereby improving your website’s search rankings. Additionally, alt text ensures that visually impaired users can comprehend the images on your site through screen readers.
When crafting alt text, be concise yet descriptive, including relevant keywords without going overboard with 'keyword stuffing'.
Image File Naming Conventions
In much the same way as you approach alt text, it’s also important to consider image file naming and how you can contribute to great SEO with keyword-rich file names.
Relevant keywords are crucial in file names, separating different keywords and points with ‘-‘ hyphens. This allows Google to recognise the individual terms and their importance in communicating the relevance of each image.
Structuring Image Data with Sitemaps
An image sitemap provides detailed information about the images on your website, such as the image location, caption, and title, making it easier for search engines to understand and rank your visual content. Including images in your sitemap also improves the likelihood of your images appearing in search results, increasing your site's visibility.
Implementing Responsive Images
A responsive image is much the same as a responsive website - it adapts to the device that it’s being viewed on.
When you implement responsive images, you ensure that users will enjoy a good experience with high quality images, regardless of the device they view the webpage and image on.
Most website builders will offer a chance to automatically resize images for different screen sizes, or you can ask your website developer to implement this for you.
Leverage Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a way of optimising page load speeds and the overall experience for users, by only loading images that the user scrolls down to.
If you have an image-heavy webpage, lazy loading essentially means that those images further down the page will not load until / unless the user scrolls that far.
In place of the correct image, placeholder images will sit and quickly become the correct image if and when you reach that part of the page. This ensures that the webpage can load more efficiently, in a more responsive and flexible way.
Monitor Image Performance
By regularly analysing key metrics such as load times, user engagement, and search engine rankings, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments. Tools like Google Analytics offer insights into how your images are performing, highlighting any issues that may be affecting your site's speed or user experience. Additionally, keeping an eye on image performance allows you to stay ahead of potential problems, such as broken links or slow-loading images, ensuring a seamless and efficient browsing experience for your visitors.
Ready to boost your website’s visibility with optimised images? Contact Social Loop for comprehensive SEO services tailored to your needs!