SEO Best Practices When Using GIFs

SEO best practices when using GIFs:-

From BuzzFeed listicles to #Twitter clapbacks, GIFs (short for Graphics Interchange Format) are part of the language of the web.

Search Google images or through Giphy, one of the largest GIF aggregators, to see a huge variety of GIFs on display from everywhere.

GIFs can be good for SEO in the same way that all well-designed images can be good for SEO - they can drive clicks and keep people engaged on a page.

GIFs can be shared, and a good branded shareable GIF can survive in the memes ecosystem for a long time.

People love #GIFs and using them can break up long articles and add relatability to the content.

GIFs aren't bad for #SEO, as long as you present them correctly and don't let them slow down the site.

GIFs can be bad for SEO if they rely on text or make them too heavy.

They can also affect accessibility, so you should make sure that GIFs meet accessibility guidelines.

Customize GIF filenames, use unique GIFs, and most importantly, write good alt text for people and SEO.

Add GIFs to the image sitemap to make sure Google knows exactly where they are.

Google says it's good for images to be added to sitemaps using image tags.

Use descriptive file names and alt text, and make sure GIFs work with surrounding text.

GIF to be well indexed in Google Images, which should optimize the placement of the GIF near relevant text and at the top of the page.

GIFs should be fast, responsive, and should have good URL structures.

Google wants to know what's going on behind this rich media file with the proper alt tags, descriptive file names, relevant image contexts, image captions, and related links.

Some methods you can use to speed up your GIFs.

Lossy compression.

Lossless optimization.

You can use image squeezing sites, or Photoshop, to cleanly reduce the size of your GIFs and speed up your webpage.

Lossy compression is the art of making your GIFs worse in ways that people don't notice to make them run faster. GIF quality will be worse, but your webpage will be much faster.

There are dozens of tools online that can help compress images.

Convert your GIF to an APNG file to retain more colors for better file size.

Using better settings when saving GIFs in Photoshop can also save on site speed.

Can also convert your GIF to HTML5 video.

Keep in mind that if there are too many forms of dynamic content on a website, the site could run much slower than a site without those forms of content.

if a site was made up of thousands of GIFs, it has the potential to have a slow load time no matter how they are presented with metadata or otherwise.

Slow page loading can hurt a website's ranking in search engines.

While page load time can be affected by a number of onsite factors, the most common solution to the GIF content conundrum is for developers to reduce image sizes.

There are several ways to reduce the size of images on a website, depending on how the site is built.

GZIP compression:

A technique to compress or deflate images up to 70% without compromising image quality.

Image optimization:

Desktop programs like Photoshop and web programs like Smush.it can help reduce image size by using the “Save for Web” feature.

The quality of the image will decrease with the image and therefore developers must strike a balance between image size and quality.

Developers who rely on HTML to reduce image size (i.e., WordPress blogs) don't actually create more space on the server.

Accessibility is a hot issue, and it intersects with SEO: good SEO practices tend to promote accessibility, and vice versa.

WebP, which considerably reduces the size of images while preserving their quality.

WebP is both lossy and lossy.

GIF content has the potential to increase engagement on a particular post or content.

GIFs are good for users and can increase traffic to your site accordingly.