Image SEO plays an important role in on-page SEO which is a good signal for search engine and improve the UX of your website
Although you have great content on 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 well as On-Page 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 brand awareness
- Improve load time of the page by optimizing images
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
- Select correct 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 the right image to improve user experience
Never add images to get improve the SEO of your webpage but you can add images to improve the user experience of your readers. Always add the relevant images for your content.
Now Google algorithm can identify the image and its contents.
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 with the retina and other high-resolution displays are going to view your web pages.
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 – HTML attributes
What is the ALT text?
ALT stands for alternative text which is an attribute of the HTML tag <img>
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.