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Images are a very crucial part of SEO and content marketing?
Why?
Because, they speak words.
Normally, people tend to read a piece of content which has visuals. It enhances the overall readability of content.
But do you actually use the images at its full potential?
The fact that images help in a better on page SEO strictly cannot be denied.
Therefore, its time that you should know and practice these 5 simple tips for the ultimate image SEO of your website!
Lets start.
TOP 5 effective for a better image SEO
Before we start on, its important to note that just like keyword stuffing, images also should be not stuffed or added unwisely.
This may result in penalty by Google.
Here are the 5 tips to be followed for image SEO:
- Use high quality unique images
- Reduce the image size, use compression techniques
- Optimize images for alt tags & captions
- Use lazy loading, browser caching and next gen formats
- Create an image sitemap
Ready?
Use high quality unique images
Simply adding few images for the sake of readability doesn’t work.
Adding is not enough, but you need to make sure that you’re actually adding a more value.
Good words with poor images can fade the feel and ease of reading.
That is why, you NEED the best images. Better said, unique, worthy images.
So how do you get it?
Where do you get it?
You have the answer to it. Be creative.
You should really refrain form the habit of using stock photos or Google search images in your article.
The latter is actually more harmful than anything.
Thing is, search bots are becoming smarter day by day. So its really hard to trick Google bots and people into it.
You can use your skills to click photos, edit them and play around them. Craft the best images and put them out on front.
There are tools like, Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Snappa and many others for editing images.
Reduce the image size, use compression techniques
Unique good quality images are important.
But, its equally important for them to be optimized for size.
Often high quality images come with bulky sizes.
This not only harms SEO, but also significantly hurts reading experience.
The factor of “page load speed” is very critical in technical SEO of any website.
There are a lot of elements for a slow loading web page.
However, images are a major culprit for it.
It is therefore necessary for images to be compressed or reduced in size.
There a lot of compressor tools which can be used for this purpose.
Simple image editing tools also allow compression and resize features.
It is advisable to keep images less than 40-50 KB only.
More than that will not serve any good.
Compression technique allows you to reduce image size while not deteriorating the quality of it.
WordPress has useful plugins for image compression techniques, WP Smush, one of the best to name.
“WP Smush” is a freemium tool widely used for image SEO.
Images are like the beauty of your article.
They add beat to the reading experience.
So, adding images to content is healthy. Yes.
But, does the Google search bots really understand your image proerly like we humans.
You may argue that, AI & Machine learning is changing the way Google bots interpret content and visuals. I agree, lord!
But still its a best practice to add alt tags to the images in content.
Who knows, Google bots might be still looking for it?!
You can add these simply by editing the HTML code of your page.
In HTML, the <img> tag serves image on the web page. “alt” is one of the key attributes of <img> tag, which you can edit using any code editor of your choice.
Secondly, adding captions to images may also help in SEO.
Caption is the text that is visible right below the image. It shortly describes the purpose of the image.
So try adding alt tags and captions, both, to your images.
Good luck!
Tip: The alt tags should strictly be simple, short & direct. Don’t be silly to write long lines & paragraphs here.
Use lazy loading, browser caching and next gen formats
Lazy loading (also called on-demand loading) is an optimization technique for the online content, be it a website or a web app.
geeksforgeeks.org
Instead of loading the entire web page and rendering it to the user in one go as in bulk loading, the concept of lazy loading assists in loading only the required section and delays the remaining, until it is needed by the user.
Lazy loading has been widely popular since past decade.
If you’re using WordPress, there are many good plugins to get this done.
Optimization plugins like WP Smush, WP Optimize and WP Rocket also have lazy loading features.
No doubt lazy loading leads to pleasing user experience, but so does the browser caching technique.
In today’s date, there’s actually hard to find a successful website that does not employ browser caching techniques.
Caching, compression, CDN, these methods make a better technically optimized SEO.
There are plugins that come with an all in one packaged feature set – caching, pre-loading, lazy loading, CDN, next gen files, etc.
EWWW Image Optimizer is specifically designed for the sole purpose of image optimization.
Create an image sitemap
Often noticed URL’s ending with /sitemap_index.xml?
Okay, these are called “sitemaps”.
A sitemap is generally a .xml file that acts like a road-map to the entire website.
Its a good practice to create sitemaps for your website.
The popular SEO plugins on WordPress like Yoast SEO, RankMath SEO ship in with sitemap feature.
The sitemaps are broadly divided into types such as, posts sitemap, pages sitemap, authors sitemap, categories sitemap.
These help Google and other search bots understand the complete hierarchy of your website.
This is how a typical sitemap looks like:
Summary
That was all about image SEO.
There are many minute but important aspects behind image SEO which may not be fully covered in this tutorial here.
But, I have covered the very core strategy of image SEO here, which can help you get better ahead with images.
Hope this would help all SEOs, bloggers, marketers, web designers and others.
If you have something to share, tip, or feedback, please! Warm welcome.
What is your opinion on image SEO?
Anything you may like to add?
What do you do for proper image SEO?
Let me know in the comments.
I DO read all the comments and reach back in case.
Thank you.
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