6 Tips for Optimizing Images for SEO(2019)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is important if you’re looking to build a successful website which attracts a lot of visitors.

Good SEO can provide a lot of targeted visitors to your blog or website and more targeted visitors will result in more sales or conversions.

To improve your search engine ranking positions (SERPs), you should fully optimize your website for SEO and this includes all the images too.

Images are an important part of any website and are one of the biggest factors when it comes to good on-site SEO.

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1. Choosing the Right Photo

Images should be appropriate for your content.

For example, if you’re writing a blog about dog walking, then you should be using images connected to dog walking.

You should also use images that you either own or are allowed to use with permission of the rights owner.

Simply copying and pasting images from Google search and using them as your own is not only against copyright laws in many countries, but it is also bad for SEO.

There are many stock photo websites where you can buy stock images.

There are even free stock images available on website such as pixabay.com.

On top of this, you can also search Google for free to use images.

Do a Google image search, then click “Search Tools” on the right-hand side and you’re then given a list of new options. Under “Usage Rights” select “Labeled for reuse” and then Google will filter the results where images are freely available to reuse.

Most images are available under license and you may be required to link back to the original source.

This is usually the case when images are published under the GNU/GPL License.

Too many outbound links can negatively affect both SEO and may cause visitors to leave your site prematurely. Therefore, you should set links to “nofollow” and to open in a new window or tab.

To do this you should use the following HTML code:

Code:

<a rel="nofollow" href="originalphotolocation.jpg" target="_blank">Image taken by Mr. A Photographer</a>
Here the “rel” section tells the search engines not to follow the link, and the “target” section tells the browser to open the link in a new tab.

2. Saving the Image

Now that you have your image, you should ensure that the filename reflects the content of the image and includes a combination of your primary, secondary or tertiary keywords.

Most cameras will automatically give the files a name using the prefix “DSC” followed by numbers.

This doesn’t tell people or search engines much about the image, so save your images using the correct file names. For example: “womanwalkingdog.jpg”

When saving images, you’ll want to ensure that they are the smallest file size as possible.

The larger the file size, the longer the page takes to load.

If a page takes too long to load, the visitor’s experience will suffer and you’ll get higher bounce rates.

Google uses both page speed and bounce rate as factors for determining SERPs and therefore images will need to be optimized for speed.

First, ensure that you are only using the size of the image that you require for your website.

If you need a picture on your website which is 300 pixels by 300 pixels, then you should edit and resize your image so that it is the size that you require.

Don’t upload images which are 4000 pixels by 3000 pixels and then use CSS to reduce the display size on screen. Browsers will still load the full image and resize it.

When saving images in programs such as Photoshop, you are given the opportunity to choose the quality of the image.

The higher the quality, the higher the file size. Try to save images in the lowest quality needed for your requirements.

Finally, you should use a free service such as TinyPNG to compress images and remove any unwanted metadata that takes up valuable space.

TinyPNG uses lossy compression to reduce file sizes even further and ensure that images are as small as possible.

3. MetaTags

When inserting images into your website, you have the option to include ALT and Title information.

This information tells people and search engines what the picture is about.

Although getting better, computers are still not very good at seeing what is in a picture.

It’s far easier for them to understand if you tell them.

Fortunately, this gives some opportunity for SEO optimization and you can insert combinations of your keywords directly into the HTML code. For example:

Code:

<img src="mywebsite.com/images/womanwalkingdog.jpg" alt="Woman Walking a Dog" title="Woman Walking a Dog">

In this code, the alt text is displayed if the browser can’t display the image for any reason.

The title is displayed when the user hovers the mouse pointer over an image.

This won’t only help visitors to know what images are about, but it will also help search engines.

You’re also likely to get your pictures located in image search results which in turn may bring some traffic.

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4. Sitemaps

All search engines recommend websites to have XML sitemaps as it provides information about what content is on your website, where it is located, and how it is structured.

You should include images in your XML sitemap.

There are two options for sitemaps. First, you can include the images in the same sitemap as your other pages. Alternatively, you can keep a separate sitemap just for images which is linked from the main sitemap.

It doesn’t matter which method you use as long as you include a sitemap.

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5. Social Media

When your content is shared on social media websites, they take images from your website to display on the shared post.

Unless you specifically tell social media websites which image to use, they will take the one that they think is best. Unfortunately, they don’t always choose the right image.

Make it easy for people to share your content on social media and ensure that popular social media websites know which images they should be using.

Websites such as Facebook and Instagram make use of OpenGraph to do this.

Code:

<meta property="og:image" content="myimage.jpg" />
This meta tag should be placed in the <head> section of your HTML code. There are other OpenGraph properties available such as og:title and og:description, but Facebook will use the title and description for the page if the OpenGraph properties are missing. Therefore, you don’t need to include both.

Twitter doesn’t use Open graph. Instead, it uses Twitter Cards. Here is an example of the HTML. It also needs to be placed in the <head> section of your file.

Code:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" /> <meta name="twitter:site" content="@myusername" /> <meta name="twitter:title" content="My Title" /> <meta name="twitter:description" content="My Content" /> <meta name="twitter:image" content="mywebsite.com/myimage.jpg">
Twitter:card refers to the type of post you want to share on Twitter. In most cases, this should be set to “summary”. Twitter:site is the twitter account which the website or page is associated with. Twitter:title is the title of the post and twitter:description is your short description or tweet. Finally, twitter:image is used to tell Twitter which image to use.

Here you can use a combination of your keywords in the twitter:title and twitter:description fields.

6. Don’t Over-Optimize

Non-optimized websites will have difficulty ranking highly in search engines, so it makes sense to optimize all parts of a website for SEO.

However, over-optimized websites may incur a penalty from search engines for trying to manipulate the search results.

Don’t stuff unnecessary keywords all over your pages.

Instead, try to use a combination of your keywords. Too many keywords can result in an over-optimization penalty.

If you have three images on your website, you should give each one a different keyword.

For example, if your main keyword is “dog walking”, then secondary and tertiary keywords may include: dog leads, take the dog for a walk, etc. In this instance, you would want to name your images as follows:

. dog-walking.jpg

. dog-lead.jpg

. take-dog-for-walk.jpg

You should also use the same keywords for your alt and title tags, OpenGraph Metadata and Twitter Cards.

Final words

Images provide a lot of scope for optimization and are an integral part of most websites, so it’s important that website owners ensure all images are fully optimized.

Follow the best practices outlined in this article as you upload any image to your website.

After doing a few, you will find that it’s not that time consuming to optimize images and has a huge effect on page loading times and SEO.