Images are important to enhance the experience of a website. Visually appealing content keeps people more engaged and quickly conveys information to the reader. However, without correct optimisation, these images can slow down your site and may even hurt its SEO. Image SEO ensures that your visuals are not only engaging and aesthetically pleasing but also contribute to bringing organic traffic to your website. Many professional SEO service providers consider image optimisation a core part of a successful digital strategy.
Here are 15 actionable tips for you to optimise your images well.
1. Choose the Right File Format
Selecting the right file format is crucial for balancing image quality and loading speed. Use JPEG for photographs as it offers good quality with smaller file sizes. For graphics with fewer colours, opt for PNG. If you're targeting animations, GIF is a suitable choice. Newer formats like WebP provide excellent compression without losing quality.
Additionally, understanding the nature of the image content can help in deciding the format. For example, high-detail photos are better suited for JPEG or WebP, while transparent backgrounds work well with PNG. Educating your team or designers about format preferences can streamline workflows and ensure consistency across your website.
2. Compressing Images without Losing Quality
Large image files cause your website to take a long time to load and impact user experience as well as SEO ranking. Use TinyPNG, ImageOptim or Kraken.io to shrink file sizes without custom loss in quality. Faster page performance happens when files are smaller, meaning the smaller files load faster. You have to get the compression and the quality balance; you don't want to over-compress an image because it will make the image look pixelated or blurry. Tools related to batch processing can also be a big help in compressing multiple photos simultaneously, saving time for the whole optimisation process. By routinely checking how the images on your website are compressed, you can ensure that your site will always have a professional and high-quality look.
3. Name Your Files Descriptively
Search engines can't understand image content if default file names like "IMG1234.jpg" are used. Instead of image1.jpg, rename your files descriptive and keyword-rich, like red-velvet-cake-recipe.jpg. For local SEO, adding location-specific keywords can also be helpful. For example, rather than beach.jpg, it could be Miami beach sunset.jpg. Not only is this a way to increase your search visibility, but it'll also give users a professional look when they download or share your photos.
4. Optimise Alt Text
Alt text is an image's textual description that assists accessibility and helps search engines understand. List down many keywords that are relevant to the description and use clear, concise explanations for each keyword. Things like a picture of a dog becoming a Golden Retriever puppy playing in a garden. Don't keyword stuff because you may have a problem with your ranking. Accessibility also has something to do with alt text because visually impaired people use screen readers and such. If you use alt text consistently across your site, you make your brand more inclusive.
5. Resize Images to Fit Display Requirements
Uploading oversized images and relying on HTML or CSS to resize them wastes bandwidth. Instead, resize images to the exact dimensions required for your site layout. Tools like Canva or Photoshop can help you achieve the right size. For dynamic websites, consider automating the resizing process using scripts or plugins that adjust images based on user devices. Providing appropriately sized images ensures a fast and smooth browsing experience, encouraging users to stay on your site longer.
6. Use Responsive Images
Responsive images adapt to different screen sizes, ensuring a seamless experience for desktop and mobile users. Implement the srcset attribute in your HTML code to serve the appropriate image size based on the user's device. For example, a high-resolution image for a desktop screen can be replaced with a smaller version for mobile. This optimisation helps reduce loading time and improve mobile usability, which is critical for SEO as mobile-first indexing becomes the norm.
7. Leverage Lazy Loading
Lazy loading delays the loading of images until they're about to enter the user's viewport. This technique reduces initial page load time and improves performance. Most modern web platforms, like WordPress, have plugins to enable lazy loading easily. Moreover, lazy loading enhances user engagement by focusing on loading only visible content first, thus creating a faster and more interactive experience for users.
8. Add Structured Data
Structured data (Schema.org) is the extra piece that helps search engines better understand your images. If you make your visuals structured data, they can deliver rich results in search and allow them to be seen. One use case is, say, if you run an e-commerce site where structured data helps illuminate product images so that you can get Google Shopping visibility. To keep your website trustworthy, keep structured data accurate and up to date.
9. Ensure Mobile-Friendliness
However, with mobile-first indexing, you want to make sure that your images not only look good on mobile devices but also work. Check your site's responsiveness and optimise images. To find and resolve issues that might harm your site's perception, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. Mobile users have come to expect fast, seamless experiences, and unoptimized images are easy to frustrate them and cost you an uptick in bounce rates.
10. Create an Image Sitemap
Image sitemaps help search engines find your images more quickly. Like with your sitemap, you fill up your RSS feeds with important images and have descriptive file names and alt text for them. Try Yoast SEO to generate an image sitemap automatically. Update your sitemap regularly with new photos and have them indexed as soon as possible. Because it's particularly useful for sites with large galleries or portfolios, this practice is worth implementing.
11. Use Original Images
The pictures aren't original, but stock photos are used more and more nowadays. Capture custom visuals/design graphics to ensure you are different from your competition. Custom images create a more valuable connection to the audience and more effectively communicate your brand's message. If you can collaborate with professional photographers or graphic designers, you're able to create high-quality, original visuals that will remain in people's minds long after.
12. Add Captions to Your Images
Captions provide context to your images, improving the user experience. While not directly a ranking factor, captions can enhance engagement and encourage readers to stay longer on your page, indirectly boosting SEO. Captions also make your content more scannable, helping users quickly grasp the essence of your visuals and text. Use captions to highlight key points or add additional information, making your content more informative and engaging.
13. Optimise Thumbnail Images
Thumbnails are smaller versions of images, but can still impact page load speed if not optimised. Compress thumbnails and ensure they're served in the correct dimensions to avoid unnecessary resource usage. Thumbnails often serve as the first impression of your content, especially in galleries or video previews. Investing time in creating visually appealing yet lightweight thumbnails can improve click-through rates and user satisfaction.
14. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
CDN stores your images on numerous servers around the world and sends them to users from the closest sites. This lowers latency and speeds up the loading speed. Cloudflare and Amazon CloudFront are popular CDNs that can improve image performance, so much so. Also, they protect your site from DDoS attacks and ensure traceability of image performance with analytics.
15. Monitor Image Performance
Audit your site's images regularly using your favourite tools such as PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Lighthouse. You find out the areas that you need to work on and how to fix them to keep the performance as best as you can achieve. Please keep track of the latest image optimisation trends and tools, and we are sure that your site will remain competitive. Since you don't want to sit back and hope everything goes the way you want it to, performance monitoring should be an ongoing process to address any new challenges or opportunities as they occur.
Conclusion
Image SEO is an important part of the whole website optimisation. If you can implement these 15 actionable tips, you can boost organic traffic, increase user experience, and achieve fast load time. If search engines continue to value quality visual content, optimised images can help set you apart from your competitors and drive more traffic to your website. Now is the time to start optimising your images!
