The image is one of the most important pieces of content of any article you upload on your website. You can keep on writing words to make readers understand about a particular thing but, a single view of an image is more effective. Images can make your text content much more interactive and even more understandable. Due to this, all search engines give a great value to images when it comes to SEO. If you have good and relevant images with the content then your content is definitely going to rank higher. Even if you talk about Google, it has a separate section for searching just images and a lot of websites get huge traffic from there. If you are confused that how an image can get you huge traffic then read this complete article to understand the importance of images.
Images are very valuable to any website or just an article when they are properly optimized according to your content. You can also understand it this way, more and more websites are emerging and it’s getting tougher to get good ranking. Thus Search engines are also strengthening their logics to rank websites and provide with the best content to readers. Because of all that you must optimize your website for on-page SEO. And one of the most important parts of on page SEO is image optimization as images are also part of the web page.
Now if you are curious to know more about optimizing images on your website then, follow the techniques below.
Techniques for Image Optimization
The Right Image
The first and most important thing to keep in mind is that your image should be relevant to the topic or content. A right image can be a thousand words and a wrong image can destroy your written thousand words. Although this step is a no-brainer but it’s the most important step as well.
There are a lot of websites which do the same mistake that they use a wrong image for the wrong content. The end result for any such mistake will be losing readers and thus Search engines will detect it and will decrease your ranking. If you are talking about a Dog in the content then your image should display a dog as center attraction. Readers should be clearly able to see what that image is trying to convey. Even if you have to display your own image for a certain reason then please do so, that will make readers understand things better.
Use of Alt Tag and Title
Alt Tag stands for the alternate tag which is useful for a search engine to see what the image is about. Usually, search engines read the text rather than images so Alt Tags help search engines to understand what the image is about. Thus by reading Alt tags search engine can improve the ranking of images on your blog and you can get a lot of traffic from that image. Not just that, Alt tags are also helpful as these alt tags show on a web page in case the images are not loading. In those cases, the Alt tags help to understand that what image was there and what was it trying to convey. Also if you are using an e-reader then also instead of images, Alt tags show up. So it is very useful to give proper Alt tags and those should be completely related to the image.
The title of an image is also as important as the Alt tags, these tell what the image is about to the readers. In other words, you can say that Alt tags are for search engines and Titles for are readers. Whenever, a reader hover over an image in Google chrome, the title of that image shows up as a tooltip. This is useful for any reader to understand what that image is trying to convey or what that image is about. So that author of the web page can fill the title perfectly to tell what the image is about.
Image size and File Name
Most people know that the faster a web page opens the better the chances that readers are going to stick to it. For the same reason, search engines will also give more value to that web page and will rank it better. Now if you want your website to load fast then you have to upload images with correct image size. If you upload an image with huge size like 2048 x 1536 then, it’ll take a lot of time to open your website. On the other side, if you upload your image with the reduced size which can load quickly then, it’ll be much better. Search engines will also start to rank your website much higher and your images will also rank higher.
Now when it comes to File name then, most people just upload their images and leave it the way it is. But, what you should be doing is confirming that the name of the file is correct and it tells what the image it about. You should always correct the name of the file and then, upload or you can upload the file and then, change the name. The main thing is that the name of the file should always make meaning rather that displaying some random number. You can also use the same thing as name, Alt tag, and title but those should be having some relevance to the image.
Image Linking and Alignment
A lot of times we have to link an image to the web page and at those times we should be careful from where we are taking those images. Images should be from the hosting where the domain is, will have more SEO effect rather than free image uploading web services. Images on your own hosting will also give you the rights to use them the way you want but other services may have their own copyright policy. So always be careful from where you link the image on your blog.
Image alignment is also very important when you write an article. Your image should always be encouraging the readers to read more rather than looking awkward and let readers skip. A portrait image can take full space of its own and that way only it looks best. But if your image is in square or portrait then sometimes aligning them right or left is the best idea. Although here you must keep in mind that the paragraph and image coming along should be of same height otherwise it gives a bad impression. Moreover, the paragraph and the image should be relevant to make sense.
Image Sitemap
We all create the XML sitemap for our website to submit links to the web page of our website to search engines. The same way make a sitemap for images to submit them to search engines. This will give you an edge over other website and not only your content but your images will also start to rank quick and better. Making image sitemap is very necessary nowadays to keep ahead and it helps to submit images very quick. The ranked images can bring a lot of traffic back to your website.
These are all the techniques which you must follow to optimize your images for SEO. Images which are well optimized for SEO will rank higher and will bring good traffic to your website.
