Learn how to optimize images for SEO with these 10 expert tips. Improve your website’s search engine visibility and enhance user experience with these 10 tips for optimizing images for SEO.

Images add a zing to websites regardless of whether they’re an e-commerce site or a blog article. Images make your website more appealing to visitors and make your content easier to read and skim.

Images, Infographics, and Illustrations can aid you in your Search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Are you looking to begin applying the most effective practices for SEO for your images? Here are 10 SEO techniques to ensure your images are dominating the pages of search results (SERPs).

SEO Image checklist of best practices 

Let’s take a look at each SEO trick for images, and then look at some examples to understand the most effective practice.

Utilize the original images whenever feasible

Stock photos are good. The original images are much better.

Search engines and readers prefer original content. With quality and unique images, you can stand out on the SERPs. Unique images allow the people you want to reach to remember your message, products, and brands, which is essential for any organization such as a Non-profit.

There are many image-related tools, such as Canva and Visme and others — many of which are driven through AI — that you can utilize to:

• Edit photos to improve the quality of photos
• Design infographics
• Create animated GIFs
• Crop product images
• Remove background from images of products

Write descriptive and relevant alt text for your images

Google cannot “read” images. According to Google’s manual that it is the alt text which is the most crucial feature when it comes to providing more details about an image. The alt text can also provide access for users of the Internet in cases as:

• Where Images aren’t showing up on websites
• Make use of it as screen readers
• Where there is slow-bandwidth Internet connections

If your image does not display correctly in a browser and the alt text is displayed instead in it’s place. If your image loads correctly and is properly displayed, the alt text will be the description of the image, which appears when the user hovers over the image.

Take a look at the following example of an ecommerce store:

The addition of relevant detailed alt text with the keywords in your images can help Google know what the images are about. You not only improve the experience for users and search engines, but you also make your images more optimized to rank in SERPs.

Pro tip

Concentrate on informative descriptions of images that contain just the appropriate quantity of keywords. Beware of keyword overloading because it can result in an unpleasant customer experience and your website may be seen as spam.

Improve your image’s filenames as well as the file path

Since Google cannot understand images, you need to provide clues as to what the image is about. Make unique and descriptive names for your images before when they are uploaded.

Google’s photos/images guidelines tell the user to keep the filenames short and descriptive like rosetta-latte-art.jpg for the image below instead of a generic JPEG_01.jpg. The descriptive filenames for your images inform the spiders of the search engine about the subject matter of your image.

When you localize your images, Google suggests you translate the filenames, but be sure to follow best practices in URL structure for special characters.

Use image file formats that are supported by the industry

If you’re optimizing your images to improve SEO, it is essential to be sure to select the correct format for your image files. Google Search supports different types of image files:

• PNG
• JPEG
• WebP
• BMP
• GIF
• SVG

If you’re uploading just a simple image, you should consider uploading it in PNG file format. Are you looking for images that are full of hue? JPEG is the most suitable photo file format.

Make sure your images are optimized for speed and quality

Internet users favor sharp, high-quality images instead of blurry images. Because of this, searchers like high-quality images, and Google also favors high-quality images over images of low quality. Create images that appeal to the people you want to reach out to by optimizing them to be of high quality.

Tools such as Adobe PhotoShop, GIMP, Image Editing Services, and Mass Image Compressor will help.

Be aware that images with high quality could have higher resolutions which means they have a larger size file that could reduce the speed of your site and adversely affect the user experience. Reduce the size of your images to lessen the loading time on your website by just reducing their size without affecting image quality.

Tools such as Adobe PhotoShop, GIMP, and Mass Image Compressor can be used here. If your site runs on WordPress look into the possibility of using image optimization plugins such as Smush that can switch on lazy load, which will improve your site’s speed.

Embed images with HTML image elements

Another best practice for SEO with images is to use HTML elements for embedding images on your site.

What impact does this code have on you? The basic HTML image elements aid the Google crawlers in locating and processing images on your site. Meanwhile, Google doesn’t index CSS images.

A good illustration for the picture SEO – the best way to go about it is to use this HTML element to display the image below:

<img src=”fittonia-plant.jpg” alt=”fittonia plant in a pot” />

Refrain from using CSS like this – example:

<div style=”background-image:url(fittonia-plant.jpg)”>Fittonia</div>

Include structured data in your photos

Another SEO technique for images that you can implement easily is to add structured information to your photos. Supplying structured information will help Google comprehend the images that you’ve included on your web pages.

Pro tip

Be sure to follow the Google General Structured Data guidelines and make use of Google’s Rich Results Test Tool to determine whether your website can handle rich results.

Another advantage of using structured data is Google can show your website’s image with rich search results. Rich results are results that give more details and encourage users to engage with your site. This is an illustration of such a rich search result:

In this example of a rich result, it is possible to save the recipe using the icon that appears on the image so that it is easy to go back to the page later.

Include your images on an online sitemap

Google suggests that webmasters share URLs for images by providing images as a sitemap. 

This is among the image SEO best practices to help search engines find and index your images.

If your site is run on WordPress the plugins available such as Yoast SEO can generate sitemaps with images for you!

Make sure to use responsive images

A pleasant experience for the visitors to your website is essential to ranking on search engines. And, it is essential to make your website accessible, which allows your intended audience to browse it without issues, no matter what device they are using. This is a fantastic practice to provide users with a seamless experience.

Use the element’s or feature scrset of the element, to indicate its responsiveness.

Your images should also be displayed correctly across all devices. So it’s a great practice to create images that are responsive as well. Make use of the element or scrset attribute on an element to show responsiveness.

However, certain crawlers are unable to understand these attributes. Another option is to define a fallback URL via an attribute called src. Your infographics should be viewable not just on desktops, but on smaller devices!

Google offers a guide to image responsiveness to assist you in optimizing your images to the best possible quality.

Improve the page titles and descriptions

In its guidelines for images, Google said in its image guidelines that it “reads” images by reviewing the text around them. Thus, it’s a good SEO practice to position images, infographics, and animated images next to relevant text.

Also, you can make sure that your images are optimized to be SEO friendly by providing pertinent title tags for your pages as well as Meta descriptions that allow crawlers to better understand your website in general.

What is the reason SEO for images is so important?

Optimizing your images for SEO is a crucial practice for website owners to rank higher on search engines and show up in rich results, allowing your targeted users to visit your site.

Additionally, using SEO images best practices will help your customers have an enjoyable experience when visiting your site, making them to visit your site again. Websites that have a positive user experience score an increase of 400% in conversion rates!

Begin optimizing your images to optimize them for SEO today

Now that you know SEO-friendly tips for your images and the reason why SEO for images is crucial, make use of this knowledge to rank better in search engines and provide your users with a better experience!