Below we give you some tips on how to optimize your images for search engines . If you do this work properly, you can improve your SEO. Keep reading and find out how to improve your website!
Why is it important to optimize your website's images?
Google Image searches are growing, people use Google Lens to do them, and also through the search engine they choose to look for visual content that answers their queries.
Optimizing your images gives you many benefits, such as better user experience, faster loading times, and an additional opportunity to rank. You can achieve more conversions and customer retention.
Google published SEO Best Practices for Google Images , where they indicate that:
“By adding more context to your images, your results can be much brazil telegram phone numbers more useful, which in turn can drive higher quality traffic to your site.”
Additionally, optimizing images takes up less storage space on your server. Therefore, your site backups will complete faster.
How to optimize your images for search engines?
There are several things you can do to optimize your images and other media for search engines:
Use a descriptive file name: Make sure you name your image files in a way that is easy for search engines to understand. For example, instead of using “image1.jpg,” use “mountain-landscape.jpg.”
Use Alt Tags: Alt tags are a way to describe the content of an image to search engines. Make sure to include a descriptive Alt tag on every image on your website.
Optimize your image size: Large images can negatively affect your website's loading time. Make sure to optimize the size of your images so they load quickly without losing quality.
Use appropriate image formats: Some image formats are better for certain uses than others, Google supports all of these BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG . For example, the JPEG format is good for images with lots of colors, while the PNG format is better for images with text or thin lines. Make sure you use the appropriate image format for each image on your website.
Use titles and descriptions for your videos and audio: Just like with images, be sure to include titles and descriptions for your videos and audio so that search engines can better understand the content of these files.
Compress your images. Using image compression tools like TinyPNG, Squoosh, and others will help you do this before uploading them to your website. You could also use WP Smush, a WordPress plugin that reduces the size of images without compromising quality. Doing so can help reduce your website's loading times.
Add structured data to your pages, this helps search engines display your images as rich results. Google Images can display structured data for product images, videos, recipes, and image metadata.
Post: How to get organic links for your website
Tips to improve your pages with visual content
Google recommends that, in addition to optimizing the images themselves, you should improve the pages where you upload them, so you can offer a good experience to users. Some of the tips include:
Images and videos should be consistent with the content of the page. Google recommends uploading images “only if they add original value to the page.” You should always use original images.
Ideally, images should be placed as close to the text as possible, which gives it context, i.e. supporting the text with images, as well as a main one at the top.
Don't put important text on images, such as headers, menus, etc. They may not load or someone may not be able to see them, and they are not translated.
Think about accessibility, so it is important to use alt text to describe the images you insert on your website.
Your website must be of quality because Google Images will not only take into account the visual element, but also the text and its quality.
Mobile optimization is very important, we all know about mobile-first indexing. Also, keep in mind that most image searches are done from mobile devices.
Google also takes into account the structure of URLs, this path and the file name help it to better understand the image. An e-commerce store with many images should structure the subfolders well, such as by product categories.