Best practices and tips for image SEO

Best practices and tips for image SEO:-

Optimizing images is an aspect that is often overlooked.

Some key tips and best practices in image SEO to help one use images as an asset in SEO strategy.

SEO involves many different parts and strategies, some of them can be quick fixes and others can take a lot longer to implement. 

So one can see why it's easy to forget something, especially for a business that is not used to doing these things and is trying to do SEO for the first time.

It might be easy to overlook some of the smaller steps like image SEO while practicing good onsite SEO.

It's important to remember that every little thing that can be done to boost a site's SEO efforts makes a difference and this is especially true if it's something other sites may ignore.

Optimizing images is an aspect that is often overlooked.

As a site is planned, designed, and images are added more often, images are added without being properly optimized, as long as they look good, the thought of images tends to sag. 'stop there.

Optimizing site images will help improve site user experience, load time, and improve the site's ranking in regular SERPs as well as image search.

Image SEO is especially important if it is an eCommerce site, as there will most likely be hundreds of images, and if not properly optimized, it will miss a lot of traffic. potential and rankings.

Image optimization will play an even more important role in search with the advancement of visual search, by being able to use images to purchase products for example.

Google and Bing both use for visual search, Google has their Google lens and Bing has their visual search.

If the website images are not properly tagged and optimized, now is the time to focus efforts on this aspect of site SEO.

Image optimization of e-commerce

If one run an ecommerce business, one knows that SEO is a different beast and how important every little change or adjustment one can make to the site is in helping to gain an edge over the competition.

One of those things is image optimization.

Images are more bytes than any other part of a website, and this is especially true for ecommerce sites, as they tend to have hundreds or even thousands of products and therefore product images.

All of these product images can have a big impact on site performance, which can also impact customer retention and conversions.

Optimizing site images is one of the best ways to improve website performance and SERP rankings, which is especially beneficial for large eCommerce sites as all images can potentially slow down the site and with the new vital websites coming from google, update the sites. speed is more important than ever.

Here are six tips on what can be done to help with website image optimization + three bonus tips.

1. Create custom image file names:

Referencing of the image begins, with the name of the image file.

When naming image file names, use a descriptive file name that also contains the correct keywords for the image.

The reason is that the name of the image file will be used to help Google understand the subject of the image.

It's important to remember that the file name of the image is what will notify Google and other search engines of the subject of the image.

2. Write SEO friendly image alt text: 

Alt text is important for site images because it is what can be used to help provide better image context which in turn will help search engines index images correctly.

This is also what will appear if there is something wrong with the image and it won't load.

Google even mentions the value of alt text in images, claiming that alt text provides them with useful image information they can use to determine the best image to return for a user's query.

3. Image file size: 

The size of the image file plays an important role in how the site will load for both users and search engines.

Having large images (file size) on the site can cause the site to load very slowly.

With page speed becoming a ranking factor, it is even more important than before to ensure that the site loads in seconds.

Site images can be large files and this is not helpful for the user experience.

This is where optimizing site image file size plays an important role, as all huge file sizes can directly affect SERP rankings and image searches, especially if one has a large e-commerce site with hundreds, if not thousands of images.

One cannot afford to reduce the size of the image file randomly, this is something that must be done correctly or else one will end up with a poor quality image.

Adobe Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature provides one of the best options for reducing image file size without affecting image quality.

If one don't have access to Adobe Photoshop, there are many other free online tools one can use to make these changes. 

Tinyjpeg is a great tool, as is Squoosh, Google's image compression tool.

Squoosh allows one to preview the changes in image quality when one start to make edits to the images.

Drag and drop the image into the web app and one of them is configured to make image file size adjustments.

Once all the changes have been made to the sizes of the image files, one can test the page speed of the site with one of the many tools available online.

There are many tools available for testing site speed, such as WebPageTest.org or Pingdom.

Google has some great tools that can be used for free to check site speed, Lighthouse, Pagespeed Insights, and their Test My site page speed tool.

Load times are important for UX and SEO, so be sure to reduce the size of the site's image files to ensure one has a fast-loading site.

4. Choose the best type of image file:

The three main types of image files are the most common that can be used on the site, they are JPEG, GIF and PNG.

Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

JPEG tends to be the best option as it is the format that offers the best options for maintaining image quality when compressing or resizing.

PNG is often used for logos because it helps to create a small image with high quality resolution.

Care should be taken, however, as the higher quality display will result in a larger file size, which could lead to issues with the performance of the page.

GIFs are similar to PNG files in that they are good smaller images, they should not be used on product photos or lager images.

JPEG is the best option format because it reduces file size without losing image quality and it is also universally supported.

5. Create an image sitemap:

Just like a sitemap that one would create for all pages on the site, creating an image sitemap, or adding the images to the current sitemap, will help Google discover the images on the site, increasing the likelihood of images being displayed in image search results and driving more traffic to the site.

Image sitemaps can contain URLs from other domains, unlike regular sitemaps, which have cross-domain restrictions.

which allows the use of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to host images.

Encourage to check the CDN domain name in Search Console so that we can report any crawl errors we can find.

Adding site images to a sitemap and especially important if running an e-commerce business and having all product images indexed.

One can add the images to the existing sitemap or create a new sitemap for the images.

Placing the images in a sitemap increases the chances that search engines will crawl and index the images, which can then increase traffic to the site.

There are many different tools that one can use to help generate the sitemap of the site, these two are a great place to start, but feel free to choose the one that works best.

Screaming Frog is one of the desktop software that offers a wide range of SEO tools.

Also free to use, including generating a sitemap as long as the website has less than 500 pages.

Yoast is an SEO plugin if one can run WordPress, they make creating a sitemap super easy, with the flick of a switch.

6. Open Graph and Twitter Cards:

Using Facebook's Open Graph and Twitter maps on the site,

Make sure that the site's content is more clickable, shareable and visible on social networks.

Facebook has a full list of OG tags that one can use on the site, but I find these are the ones to focus on.

Og: title

Og: url

Og: image

Og: type

Og: description

We will pay particular attention to the og: image tag because it is the most essential Open Graph tag because it is the one that occupies the most social flow of real estate.

Twitter cards work the same as Facebook's Open Graph tags.

The use of Twitter's "Big Picture Summary Card" tag is where we will focus on when it comes to images.

The large image summary card features a large, full-width, prominent image next to a tweet.

It is designed to provide the reader with a rich photographic experience and by clicking on the image the user will take one to the website.

Once the beacons are in place on the site, they can be tested to ensure that they work as expected and that they are ready to be shared.

We can use these tools to check the OG tags of the site:

Facebook Share Debugger

Twitter card validator

LinkedIn Post Inspector

If we took the time to add the HTML code to the site for the Open Graph and Twitter maps, we can guarantee that the image will appear on social platforms every time the link is shared.

Bonus image optimization tips.

The Six Image Optimization Tips are three additional tips to help one optimize site images.

7. Mobile-friendly images:

With Google's mobile indexing, it's important to think about how site images work on mobile.

Just as the site will be made responsive, one thing one may not know is that it can also make the sites responsive.

Having responsive images will ensure that the images will perform well on devices with significantly different screen sizes.

Screaming Frog is one of the desktop software that offers a wide range of SEO tools.

Also free to use, including generating a sitemap as long as the website has less than 500 pages.

Yoast is an SEO plugin if you can run WordPress, they make creating a sitemap super easy, with the flick of a switch.

8. Structure of the image file:

Google mentions in its updated image guidelines that they use the file path and filename to categorize images.

Create URL structure for images: Google uses the URL path as well as the file name to help it understand images.

A good practice would be to place the images in different category folders that would correspond to different products instead of just grouping them all into a generic folder.

9. Structured data:

To help the images stand out even more, we will want to add structured data.

By adding structured data to the images, the images can then be displayed as rich results, which would then give users relevant information about the page, which could then drive more targeted traffic to the site.

Google Images supports structured data for:

Product

Video

Recipe

Hence Image SEO involves a few different aspects and elements to fully exploit its potential and search engines like Google and Bing will only recognize these elements better.

For comparison, image SEO is relatively easy, when it comes to SEO. It's not as complex as other aspects of SEO.

If we take the time and put a little more effort into properly optimizing the site images for users and search engines every time we add an image to the website, we can give pages a little additional benefit in search engines.

Key takeaways for image SEO best practices and tips for image optimization:

Create an image sitemap or make sure the images are featured in the sitemap for crawling and indexability.

Choose the correct image file format.

Compress images for faster page loading speed.

Create unique images.

Create optimized image file names.

Write SEO optimized alt texts and make sure they are relevant to the page.

Like the site, make sure the images are mobile-friendly.

Use relevant, high-quality images.

Customize the file names.

Add structured data.

Create images.