If you can deliver all images to your website that are of the best quality possible, are in the exact format they are supposed to be, correct dimensions and perfect resolution, yet their size is really small too – then you have mastered the art of Image Optimization.
Image optimization is important because it gives a boost to SEO, improves the loading speed of the site, and enhances the overall user experience.
Image optimization in SEO includes the following techniques: Always name your images as per the keywords you are targeting. Images are an important source of traffic. If your enough is good enough to be picked up by Google and ranked on the Google images, you will receive a lot of traffic from here as well. Always use copyright free images with the highest quality. You can click an image yourself. With the high quality of cameras available on own phones, it’s not a bad idea to click the image of your own product and upload something brand new on the web for the first time ever. Images should always be relevant to the page/content against which it is being placed. Alt tag your images with important details and also add title attributes. On page image captions and surrounding text can include keywords. The story of Alt tag is of so much relevance and importance is mainly because most search engines even today cannot read images. They mostly crawl through the text. For them the image section appears blank. This blank space when covered with Alt texts tells the search engine that this is not in fact a blank space but includes an image and the alt text also describes the image in a short detail to the search engine.
Naming your images: Just as keywords are important to SEO, so are image labels to the images you upload on the website. Giving your image simply a number or something illegible is only going to work against you. A short descriptive image like sunset_clicked_on_iphone is all you need for a better listing on search engines.
Image optimization techniques in SEO also include defining the format of your image. JPEGs are considered more SEO friendly than PNGs. You can also use SVG format for higher quality images. Always make sure your image is 100kb or less. This is considered to be the optimum size of the images for the web. Use proper image compression tools for reducing the size of the images. Google values mobile views of website. Therefore the loading time and the size of the image perfect for the mobile view needs to be considered. Make sure you follow through with the pictures on your site. If you are a cooking blog for example and you have added images only of the first few steps and not the rest or missed out on the image of the final product, the users are not going to be impressed no matter how interesting your content is. Therefore make sure there are no gaps or unexplained disappearances in the flow of images on your page. That said, adding images is a also a balancing act, too many images, without relevant text is also going to lose appeal in the viewers eyes. Adding captions is a good idea. Just like URLs, captions are also crawled by search engines. Bounce rates increase when the captions don’t match the image. In case of obvious flaws, like calling a dog a cat, the viewers are going to up and leave and this will send a very bad message to Google. Not adding captions is a SEO faux pass. It is an opportunity missed to gain more from Google. A research showed, users read captions 300% more than the actual body of the text.
