Images play an important role in making your site more attractive to visitors. You will spend a lot of time choosing the right images for blog posts, product pages, etc. But are you spending a lot of time optimizing your images for search engines?
The most common advice you can find online when it comes to image SEO is to include alt text.
Here it is. It seems like there is nothing more. Wish it was that easy! If your website is based on visual content, you should take the time to customize the images on your website. This not only brings in more organic traffic, but also improves the user experience.
Descriptive File Names
In terms of images, it can be argued that advances in Google's machine learning capabilities have led to the discontinuation of descriptive filenames for images. This has encouraged marketers to try Google CloudVision API, Google's machine learning tool for image recognition. Take a random image from the web, remove the descriptive text from the filename, and upload it to see how accurately Google predicts most images. Do this to boost your organic traffic through image seo
Page Load Time
Page load time is an important SEO factor on desktop and mobile. In addition, images are often the biggest contributor to page loading. According to Google, images often have the greatest impact on overall page size, which can be slow and expensive to load. When optimizing the frame rate, you should choose the format that provides the best compression and the least loss in quality.
Most images on the Internet can be categorized into two types of files: JPEG and PNG. There are other file formats such as GIF and, more recently, WebP, but they are not as widely used as the two previous formats.
Compress Images
This is a very important step in optimizing your images for SEO. The larger the image file size, the longer it will take for the website to load. Website speed is an important ranking factor and you should do your best to optimize the speed and performance of your website. Large image files are the main cause of speed problems. Fortunately, there are several free tools on the Internet that you can use to reduce the file size of your photos. Regardless of the selected image format, you can reduce the size of the image file without compromising its quality.
Alt Text for Images
Alternative text also known as the Alt property, is used to describe the image. Adding alt text to your images improves web accessibility and helps your browser improve the images on your website. If there is a problem loading the image, the browser displays the alt text. Despite Google's progress in understanding images, adding alt text to images is still an essential SEO element for your pages.
Browser Caching
Browser storage can speed up your website by storing some of your website's largest files (including images) locally in your web browser. Every time a browser loads a web page, all web browsers must be loaded in order to display the web page correctly, including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images.
Some pages may contain multiple files and may be small, while other pages may contain many files and may be large. These large files can take a long time to load and each file responds to a separate request to the server, which slows down the page. Some of these large files are stored in the visitor's browser, which can be useful for the browser's memory. Ideally, your site will load faster, so leave it as it is.