Image SEO plays an important role in on-page SEO

Although you have great content in your web page you have to add eye catching and relevant images to your content to bring your page to the next level when you consider the user experience as will as SEO 

When you add SEO optimized images to your article, you can achieve

• You can bring SEO value to your contents
• You can get an appealing look to your webpage hence it will enhance user experience.
• Unique images can be used to improve the brand awareness
• Improve load time of the page

Here is why Image optimization is important for google ranking

Below you can see the proven factors why image optimization is important for your website.

Know the facts!

According to Moz, image search would represent 27% of all queries generated across the top 10 US web search properties

Images are an important source to generate traffic to your website.

Do you know that more than one third of all keywords now contain Google Images!. And nearly 50% of the time when images are in the Top 10, they are in the Top 3 rank positions!(SEO Clarity).

More than one 1 billion of queries are made in Google Images  every day (Source Google)

There are more than 2 billion searches on Pinterest every month (hootsuite)

34% of  Google search results has images  (source Econsultancy);

Tweets with images receive 150 percent more retweets (source crazy eggs);

Now we will see how we can optimize images in your web page

• Use the right image for your website to improve the user experience of your webpage
• Right image format
• Scale for image SEO
• Compress images to reduce size
• Meta tags
• Cache web pages
• Use CDN
• Structured data for images
• Lazy loading
• Create image sitemap
• Use responsive images

Now images are displayed in a google search results in different ways. When you look the following result set you can understand how important images in a page 

1 Use right image to earn user experience

Never add images to get improve the SEO you can focus only to improve the use experoce of your radears. Always add the right image for your content

2 Use right image format

Web images have three main formats called JPEG, GIF and SVG. When you select images for your website pay your attention to select correct image format

You can follow the following guideline to select the image format for your website.

3 Scale for image SEO or Responsine Images

There are different screen sizes people are using these days. If you allow the same image which was designed for a larger screen like 2500×1500 pixels,  to load in a 250x100px device, that is a huge waste of resources as well as higher loading time result in bad user experience. 

To overcome this issue you can use responsive images with media query in  CSS. In simple terms different images for different screen sizes.

4 Compress images to reduce size

Reducing the size of the image is another important factor. By reducing the size of the image you can reduce the load time of the webpage which is a ranking factor.

You have to reduce the size of the file without compromising the quality. Quality of the image is very important because users are  retina and other high resolution displays to view your web page.

How do you compress images?

Once you complete adding text and images to the webpage check the loading speed of the page and make sure it loads under 2 seconds.

5 Meta Tags for Image SEO

What is the ALT attribute of image tag?

Some people call this an ALT tag but the correct name is the ALT attribute.

ALT stands for alternative text which is a attribute of the HTML tag

So it is like this

Why do you need ALT text for images?

This is added to support the accessibility feature of the HTML tag. Screen readers can read the text inside the ALT attribute and it is useful for visually impared users to understand about the image.

Search engines also use this text to understand about the image. These days Google search engines can understand the image by using the latest artificial intelligence. But in the SEO world, people still use this ALT text to get an on-page SEO boost.

Another advantage of the ALT text is, when the image inside the post is broken you can see the ALT text next to the icon.