Basic Guidelines to Improve Your Website’s Image SEO
Image SEO is often overlooked when optimizing a website for search engine ranking. However, visual content can easily grab the attention of visitors or conversely push them away. If you’re not careful, poor image SEO can damage your page’s ability to gain links, rise in ranks, and drive organic traffic.
You can make a huge impact on your image SEO with just a few steps. Here are some tips to make sure your images are fully optimized for search.
Use Compression
Website loading speed is a key factor that influences a page’s ability to rank and keep visitors on-site. Site speed impacts a user’s ability to move from page to page along your conversion path. Image compression is necessary to offer seamless transition and a pleasant visitor experience. If your pages are loading slowly, Google is not going to serve them to their users.
Next-Gen Image Format
When you upload your images, use next gen formats if possible. These are JPEG 2000, JPG XR and WebP. You might not have heard about them since JPG and PNG are the most prominent ones. But while JPG and PNG are still the dominant image formats, next-gen formats like JPEG 2000 offer better encoding that helps websites load faster and use less data.
Image Scaling
Ideal image size (dimensions, not file size) is going to depend on your CMS, as well as the design and format of the page. Look for dimension best practices for your specific CMS (Shopify recommends using 2048 x 2048 pixels for product photos) before uploading your images.
Provide Full Image Information
When Google is determining which image to return for an image query, it analyses the information it has access to: image title, caption and alt text. With limited space for image designation, you need to be giving Google all the information you can about your image in the space you’re allotted.
Seamless Social Sharing
Social media marketing and promotions on social platforms have become the norm and platforms like Facebook and Twitter have made this possible. With Open Graph and Twitter Cards, it’s easier than ever to have your website properly shared on Facebook or Twitter, with an image and descriptive snippets displayed correctly. This can have a great impact if you want your images to gain traction on social media and generate strong social signals for your site.
