Effective imagery makes your website content more attractive and engaging, and contributes to increasing your rankings on search engine results pages. According to a report, over 20% of web searches happen on Google Images, further emphasizing the importance of imagery use. Pictures command more attention than text content on your website and act as a driving force for web traffic. Optimized images for websites make it easier for visitors to understand the content on your webpages, increase your page loading speed, and improve your overall user experiences.
Optimize Your Images To Improve Your SEO
Image optimization refers to the process of delivering high-quality images with the right size, format, and resolution to increase user engagement. From resizing and caching to compressing, there are many different ways to optimize an image. Image optimization helps improve your website’s page loading speed and SEO ranking, boosts your user’s experience on your site, and increases your website’s conversion rate.
Compress Your Images
To optimize images for your website, consider compressing them to an appropriate size. While optimizing images, consider choosing the right compression rate. Before uploading images to your website, use compression tools like TinyPNG and WP Smush to reduce the image file size without reducing its quality. Compressed images improve website speed by up to 33% and enhance user experience while increasing your website’s SEO ranking.
Find Unique Images
Every successful website makes use of original yet high-quality images to maximize its SEO. Some website designers will frequently use stock images for site content. Even though this practice is acceptable from a design standpoint, it’s unlikely that it will improve SEO. Remember, search engines prefer original and unique images when ranking websites. Stock images can, therefore, be an obstacle to ranking, as competitors in the same industry are likely using them as well.
Use a Responsive Layout
People tend to access websites from more than one device. According to a study, around 95% of visitors use smartphones to access the internet, while 93% use PCs and 73% use tablets. With an increasing number of mobile and tablet users, businesses must remember to optimize their websites for all devices, rather than just traditional PCs. Just like the content on any other website, if your images are not mobile-friendly, it can cause a high bounce rate and low conversions. No matter if your users are visiting your website through desktop or mobile, responsive images fit the size of their devices and provide them with an optimum user experience.
Use SEO Optimized Alt Tags
Pictures can tell a thousand words for your website visitors, but alt tags tell web crawlers what your image and pages are about. It’s important you use alternative texts with images to let search engines index your image content. Alternative text, or alt tags, are used to provide context for website images and add the necessary accessibility features to your website. Even when an image doesn’t load due to some technical glitch, you will get an image box with alternative text on the top left corner describing what should have appeared. These alt tags also help search engines rank your web page, so they are beneficial for your overall on-page SEO strategy.
Start Optimizing Images To Improve Your Organic Rankings
Remember, image SEO is the sum of a variety of elements. The easier it is for search engines to recognize these elements, the higher the likelihood of your website ranking on search engine result pages. Also, ensure that both the image and alternative text that you use are relevant to the content on each web page where they appear. If you’re struggling to get your website noticed and you think images are to blame, you can always reach out to a reliable SEO agency to help improve your visibility for both search engines and your audience.
