Optimizing Website Images for SEO
Companies that are looking to improve their website ranking on search engine results pages and get an edge in their search engine optimization efforts need to start investing in optimizing the images that they publish on their website. In fact, companies that don’t invest in image optimization can end up losing out on website traffic, engagement, as well as sales. After all, search engines like Google tend to look at over 200 different factors when they’re deciding to rank a website for a specific search query from the users. Although having an optimized image won’t help companies that have low-quality content on their website, it can help any company stand out from the crowd if its competitors aren’t optimizing their own images. Fortunately, optimizing images on the website isn’t too complicated and has just a handful of steps.
Image SEO
The process of optimizing images so that they can generate more website traffic from search engines is what image SEO is all about. For example, if a company improves its image optimization efforts, it can increase its ranking on search engine results pages, more specifically, on Google images. As website accessibility has increasingly become a requirement in many countries around the world, including legally, companies can utilize image optimization to improve their website accessibility as well as increase their rank. Most of the search engine optimization efforts tend to be centered around keywords and text-based content, however, images are quite important too, as they’re a big part of the user experience.
Most people have come across a website in the past that looked like a simple word document that only has black text on a white background, which made them click off the website immediately. According to research throughout the years, visual assets can help more people understand and retain information faster, which means images can make any website content a lot more interesting and powerful. Additionally, the reason why image optimization is so important for search engine optimization overall is that search engine algorithms look at different types of metrics, including how long the website visitors stay on a page, and the bounce rate to understand the user experience for that website. Not to mention, there’s also the fact that while the website visitors will only see the image itself on the website, the search engine crawlers are going to see the alt text behind the image, that companies can fill in to tell the search engines more information about the image as well.
Optimization
Optimizing images for search engines is done with a few simple steps, but the most important one is for companies to use relevant and high-quality images on their websites. It’s also important for companies to remember that they should only be using images that they own, or that are publicly available for free. Another optimization strategy is for companies to change the name of the image file before it’s uploaded to the website to something that fits the image itself, and companies can also include some of their targeted keywords in the file name. Finally, companies can add alt text to each image that they publish on their websites to improve accessibility, tell the search engines what the image as well as the page are about, and include a few keywords that the company is already targeting.
