Search engine optimization or SEO is vital to building your company’s brand. A lot goes into crafting a quality SEO campaign. Some small businesses often assume that SEO is all about keyword research and that having blogs filled with targeted keywords is enough for a solid SEO strategy. But SEO services and analysts will agree that overlooking the smaller parts of SEO will sorely hurt your analytics and content marketing efforts.
One SEO tactic that is often missed is image optimization. When your website’s images are optimized properly, you will see faster loading times, a better user experience, and better rankings. Additionally, users typically engage better with image-heavy content. For instance, studies have found that potential customers are 80% more likely to read content that contains images and over 60% likely to remember it later.
Now that you understand how important image optimization is, you might be wondering what are the key SEO strategies to use for images. When it comes to having good SEO, your company might not be skilled or experienced with every SEO strategy. That’s why it’s best to hire an SEO agency or SEO consulting firm to help with your efforts. Consider White Label SEO Reseller, an SEO company that offers link building for digital marketing agencies. By outsourcing some of your SEO efforts, you’ll be able to spend more time on your business’s core specialties. Below we outline a few major tips to optimize images but consult with an SEO agency for more advanced techniques.
Use Alt Text
Adding alt tags to your images helps search engine crawlers identify what the picture is about. which is helpful for improving your rankings on search engines like Google. Essentially, the alt text is what shows up if the image doesn’t load properly and is required by law under the American Disabilities Act. You want to have descriptive, SEO-friendly text for the alt tag. Be sure to include your primary keywords as well in the alt text. Often, your website’s dashboard might have a field where you can put in the alt text.
Add Images to Sitemap
Submitting a sitemap to Google helps with having your webpages crawled and filed into the index. Include images in your sitemap which improves the likelihood of those images being added to Google Image Search, thereby increasing your website’s rankings and search results. A dashboard like WordPress can create an image sitemap for you through a plugin.
Customize Filename
Most users generally won’t see the filename, but that shouldn’t mean you should skip this relatively easy step! When uploading an image to your webpage, customize the filename so it matches the image. For instance, if your brand specializes in selling sneakers and you upload an image of black sneakers, then label the filename your brand name-black-sneakers. It’s recommended that you include a targeted keyword in the unique filename as well. Changing the filename from a series of numbers to a keyword-rich text helps search engines understand what the image is about and provides relevant information about the webpage.
Change Image Size
You want to have high-quality images, but images that aren’t so massive they slow down your website’s speed. Site speed is an incredibly important aspect of SEO because of its user-friendliness. That’s why you should always resize and compress your images before uploading them to your webpage. Scale down the image size using tools in Adobe Photoshop, for example. Once you’ve reached the desire image size, compress the image so as to not reduce image quality. TinyPNG is a good platform to use for compressing images that doesn’t compromise their quality.
