Image optimization is very crucial because it can bring you a lot of traffic to your website. Image SEO is an targeted and organic way too. If you are missing image optimization you will miss so much traffic. Here are some tips to optimize images for search engines.
ALT Text
ALT text is the only thing that search engines spider can read. Alt text is the important thing in image optimization. It is a simple text to describe about that image. It should be descriptive and informative. Don’t use more lengthy or short alt tags. You can also use title tag in images. But it cannot boost performance. Title tag is only for humans, to read it.
File name
Using unreadable file names are one of the mistake. It is just like permalink to the pages. Instead of using numbers and unreadable names, you should use your targeting keywords as image name. Hence search engines can identify that image well.
Reduce File size & Optimize image
Optimized images can improve performance. It can load much faster. You should reduce the file size without losing its quality. Here are some tools to optimize your images:
- Yahoo Smush.it (Online)
- Riot (Free Software)
- PNGGauntlet (Free Software)
Relevant content
Your content should be related to that image. If your content doesn’t match with the image, search engines will consider it as spam and did not rank well.
Link that image
Search engines like links. This is a plus point and this is not a essential thing. If you linked images to any pages or that images itself you may get better result.
Submit Image SiteMap
Image sitemap will helps to crawl images much better, that search engines are missing. Your images will get indexed on image search. Keep your images in separate XML sitemap, not in your sitemap that contains pages. Here is the sample code for an image sitemap from Google Webmaster tools.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/sample.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/photo.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
</url>
</urlset>
You can submit this image sitemap to Google, Bing or any other.
Same as web search, search engines like Google makes image search result more relevant. If you spend little bit time to optimize your image, you will get better traffic. Is this tips enough for image SEO? Share your ideas.
Rahul i appreciate your efforts but it is tough for laypersons to follow all this—but thanks!
To me it’s really important, you can get high volumes of traffic from Google image search. Actually just yesterday I received 100 visits from image searches. Just name the image correctly and not right something random.
Didn’t know about image sitemaps existence! Thanks for useful info.