Images are crucial for making your content more appealing and accessible. But they’re also just as important when it comes to SEO. Relevant images let search engines rank your website higher.  And beautiful optimized images even reduce loading time.  For all these reasons, the choice and optimization of your images are essential. Let’s talk about it!

What is an optimized image?

It’s simply a high-quality image with the right format, size and resolution. A mesmerizing image will grow your users’ engagement. It’s captivating and eye-catching

To optimize your images, you absolutely must label them. This way, search engine robots will have an easier time accessing your images and understanding your page’s content.  You need to know that images take up more bytes than any other components of a website. This may impact website performance by prolonging loading times.  It’s often tempting to reduce image size so that they take up less space, but be careful. You need to make sure that this does not compromise their quality.

How do I optimize my images?

Start by skillfully resizing them before you choose the right format. Opt for JPEG format for coloured images and PNG for black and white.

If it is necessary to compress an image, make sure that its size doesn’t become so small that you risk compromising quality. Choose the compression ratio that fits each image. To make it simple, you can also use image touchup tools like: Adobe Photoshop, Jpeg Mini, OptiPng or FileOptimizer. These tools offer the option, “save for web,” which will automatically adapt your image size to web format while maintaining its quality.  You can test the impact of resizing the image on your page’s loading speed using tools like  Pingdom, GTmetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights.

What are alt tags?

Visitors can fairly easily understand the meaning of your images, but search engine robots need certain indicators to better locate and rank your site.  To speed up the indexing of each of your website pages that contain images, add alt tags. Alt tags are alternative texts that provide image descriptions.

What about file names?

To help your images contribute to SEO, name them with relevant keywords. The name of each of your website’s image files needs to adapt to both the web and Internet users. In other words, choose a name that makes sense.

How do I choose the title of an image?

On WordPress, an image’s title generally comes from a file name. You can therefore leave it as is.  Otherwise, you can rename the image using keywords, just like when you chose your file names.  Obviously, the image titles are not as important for SEO, but they can support your alt tags. Remember that they also play a fairly significant role in engaging your website visitors. The super savvy among you will find a way to add a call to action.

Don’t forget captions.

Placed beneath images, captions are visible on the webpage and also contribute to user engagement. To minimize your rebound rate, create captions that reflect your content.

What images do I need?

There are several free image banks on the Internet. The issue with these images is that other companies will use them, and therefore, they won’t necessarily improve your website’s SEO. Use unique images to add originality to your content and optimize your site for SEO.

Final Points to Check

• Always remember to check the relevance of each image you choose in relation to your textual content. If your content does not provide enough information on what you do or what you offer, include a lovely image description to fill in your prospects.
• Know that Google uses structured data to rank websites. Keep this in mind while you’re optimizing your images. To learn more, follow Google’s instructions.
• To ensure that search engine robots notice each image, include them in your site map.

In conclusion, you can use several methods to optimize your website images.  When you’re deciding on the design of a website that includes images, consider the user experience first. Beyond your efforts to improve your presentation and ranking, your goal is to attract new prospects.  Optimize your images to make sure they have a positive impact on your website visitors

Don’t forget that converting a visitor into a customer happens step by step.  Work up to visitor engagement by offering beautiful content to your future customers. As for SEO, try out the techniques we’ve discussed and watch yourself stand out from your customers in no time.