Why Image SEO Matters for Boosting Search Engine Rankings?
SEO, or search engine optimization, has become a necessity for online businesses. To be visible in the world of digital marketing, businesses must optimize their websites for search engines.
Today, SEO is a familiar term for most of us, and those working in digital marketing are well-acquainted with terms like content creation, backlinks, and keywords, all of which are strategies to improve a website’s SEO. However, one aspect that is often overlooked but can have a significant impact on your site’s SEO is image SEO.
When it comes to SEO, most people focus on optimizing text, site speed, user experience, and so on. But an important aspect that many webmasters ignore is image SEO. With a few simple strategies, you can optimize the images and infographics on your site for both users and search engines, and see a remarkable improvement in your site’s SEO.
Image SEO encompasses all the strategies you use to improve the images on your website, making them optimized for both users and search engines. Since visual content plays a significant role in attracting users, image SEO can greatly enhance your website’s optimization and attract more visitors.
Although image SEO involves a few simple and quick steps, many websites ignore it and fail to optimize their images. Image optimization can have a substantial impact on your site’s SEO, especially for e-commerce websites.
In this article, we will discuss image SEO and its importance in the world of SEO, and finally, we will suggest some simple strategies for optimizing your website’s images. If you’re one of those websites that haven’t yet considered image SEO, stay with us.
What Is Image SEO?
A Simple Guide for Beginners.
The importance of images and visual content is undeniable. Nowadays, almost every website uses images alongside text to enhance appeal, and it’s rare to find a website without any images.
The importance of images is even greater for certain types of websites, like e-commerce sites, where site managers strive to provide better and more attractive images for users. In addition to users, search engines also value images, and your website’s images get indexed just like text.
This is where the importance of image SEO comes into play. Image SEO includes all the strategies, from selecting the right image to choosing the appropriate Alt tag, that help optimize your website’s images for both search engines and users.
With a few simple steps, you can optimize your site’s images for search engines and become visible in image searches as well. Additionally, optimizing your site’s images can significantly influence your audience.
Why Image SEO Is Crucial?
Image SEO Is Crucial for Digital Marketing Success.
Images and visual content have a huge impact on attracting an audience. If you use attractive images alongside your content, you can definitely captivate users at first glance, so you must be very careful when choosing images for your site.
In recent years, infographics have also become very popular. Infographics allow you to present your content in a summarized form to users and make the reading experience more engaging and easier by visualizing data.
Furthermore, people today are more interested in searching for images than ever before and often use Google’s Image Search. If you optimize your website’s images, you can also be discovered through image searches, attracting many users to your site.
As visual search becomes more prevalent, the importance of image optimization on websites is increasing, and it’s predicted that in the coming years, even more people will turn to image searches.
Moreover, image SEO also affects user experience. By choosing the right image, you can make your content more appealing, and by optimizing image sizes, you can increase your website’s speed. Adding descriptive text to your images also helps users better understand the content.
How to Optimize Images for SEO?
A Step-by-Step Guide.
Now that you understand the importance of image SEO and its significant role in website SEO, it’s time to start optimizing your site’s images. Below are some simple strategies for image SEO.
The first step in image SEO is selecting the right and relevant image for your content. If you have the ability to use your own custom images, definitely do so. For example, if you have an online store, try to take your own product photos, or if you’re writing about your company and business, you can use real images of your workplace and team.
However, if custom photography isn’t an option, try to use images that are relevant to the topic. Finding the right image might seem difficult at first glance. You can search for the topic in Google and use the Images section, but often, the images there are of low quality and very similar to each other.
You can use websites like Flickr, FreeImages, and Freepik to find different images for free that match your content.
To personalize your site’s images, you can place them in a unique format on your site. Adding your logo or graphic designs alongside the image can help you personalize images for your website.
Choose the appropriate format for your images. Usually, jpg, PNG, and Gif formats are used on the web. If you have a business site with many images, the jpg format is very suitable, as you can compress this format without losing image quality, thereby reducing the page’s size.
Reducing the size of images significantly helps lower the page’s size, which in turn increases site speed. Before uploading images to your site, you can reduce their size using photo editing tools like Photoshop.
There are also many free online tools for reducing image sizes that can help you easily reduce your page sizes.
Reducing your site’s image sizes greatly helps decrease the site’s bounce rate. You can also design your site’s code in a way that the main text is displayed first, followed by the loading of images.
Choosing appropriate names for your images not only helps with finding them on the site and organizing your site’s database but also affects your site’s SEO. Select a name related to the image so that search engines can understand your images and index your pages better.
For example, for the images in this article, we can use names like “image SEO” or “SEO for images.” Choosing these names not only helps us find images on the site later but also affects image SEO.
The Alt tag is the text displayed to users if the image doesn’t load. On some websites, you can also see the Alt tag text when hovering the mouse over the image.
The Alt tag significantly impacts image SEO and is a key factor in displaying your site’s images in Google’s image search. Using the Alt tag, you can describe your images to search engines and users. It’s recommended to use the main keywords of your content in the Alt tag.
A sitemap helps search engines better understand your content and pages. Including your site’s images in the sitemap greatly assists in identifying your site’s images to search engines and improves your site’s SEO.
The Importance of Visual Content
While text content is an integral part of digital marketing, using appropriate visual content is also extremely important. Visual content plays a crucial role in attracting an audience. Research shows that from the moment a user enters your site, you only have 7 seconds to capture their interest and keep them on the page. Since people prefer visual content, using the right visuals can greatly help in achieving this goal.
Additionally, visual content is much easier to remember. Studies indicate that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and people generally recall 65% of the visual content they’ve seen, compared to only 10% of the text content after a few days.
All these statistics highlight the critical role of visual content in digital marketing. An appropriate image can be several times more impactful than text. Today, more than 60% of the content produced on the web is visual, and this figure is increasing daily.
Most digital platforms are built around photos and visual content, as images and videos tend to generate higher engagement rates. For example, on Facebook, posts with images or videos are seen 30% more than text-only posts.
Another advantage of using visual content is that it greatly helps in increasing visibility. People are more inclined to engage with visual content than text. This is why visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content. Facebook posts with images are shared 230% more often than those without images, and tweets with images receive 150% more retweets.
Moreover, with today’s tools, creating visual content is easier and faster. Writing a blog post takes more time and effort compared to taking stunning photos and sharing them. Another benefit of visual content is that you can also involve your users and audience in the process by using user-generated content. This not only strengthens your relationship with your audience but also reduces content production costs.
Finally
It should be noted that image SEO is one of the simplest tasks you can do to enhance your site’s SEO. Since most websites overlook image SEO, you can get ahead of your competitors by optimizing your site’s images.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Image SEO?
Image SEO includes all the strategies, from selecting the right image to choosing the Alt tag, which helps optimize your website’s images for search engines and users.
- What is an Alt Tag?
The Alt tag is the text displayed to users if the image doesn’t load. On some websites, you can also see the Alt tag text when hovering the mouse over the image.
