Images are the best way to stand out among a huge amount of competition on 1.94 billion websites.
Recent research found that people follow visual instructions 323% better than written instructions.
Spending a little time optimizing your images for search engines is a simple and effective way to give your website a ranking opportunity in the search results.
Most image optimization tactics also help enhance the user experience, which is a top priority for SEO. So, the effort you put in will not only increase the likelihood that people will visit your site but will also boost the probability that they will enjoy the visit.
This guide will show you how to optimize your images and build image links so that more people can reach you.
What Is Image SEO?
Image SEO is the process of making your images more search engine-friendly by using smart techniques. Creating alt text, downsizing photos, and including useful keywords in file names are all potential steps in this direction.
The addition of images to your site can increase its visual appeal while also making the text easier to read. Not only that, but pictures also improve your site’s performance.
According to a Skyward report, your content can get 94% more views than your (boring) competitors if it has some interesting photos.
Image SEO can contribute to making your content more accessible to crawlers. As a result, you can see an improvement in your ranking in the SERPs. With some optimization, your pictures can even get up on the first page of Google’s image search.
What Role Does Image SEO Play To Improve Website Performance?
We’ve discussed how optimizing your images for search engines can help your site. But if your site is slow because of too many large images, you may lose visitors.
Google uses page load time as a quality signal. If your website takes too long to load, it can hurt your search engine rankings.
Image optimization can speed up page loads.
This faster speed can result in a better user experience more satisfied website visitors and a higher search engine rank.
Image SEO Techniques
Images are a powerful way to grab a reader’s attention and compel them to take action. The addition of images to your website is a simple method to boost its usability.
There’s no denying that optimizing images for both visitors and search engines remains as crucial as ever.
Here are 8 tried and true image SEO techniques that will please your readers as well as search engines.
Use Appropriate, High-Quality Images
In terms of SEO, it is important to use high-quality images that are relevant to your content. Users will become frustrated with your site if it contains irrelevant images, and your professionalism will take a hit if the images you do employ are of low quality.
Incorporate only high-quality images that are relevant to the content on the page.
Also, DIY design tools like Canva make it possible for people who aren’t designers to make creative graphics quickly, easily, and affordably.
Spend some time looking for a good image to go with each page you build and news story you post. It’s best to find more than one.
Customize The Filename
It is surprising that many people don’t take this simple step.
Spend some time customizing the filename before adding the picture to your blog. Replace it with some text that describes the picture and, ideally, contains one of your page’s target keywords. For instance, if your website features a handbag you sell, the image’s file name might be something like comfortable-handbag.jpg.
Even though most users are unlikely to see the filename, it is a great opportunity to tell search engines exactly what the page is about and which keywords are most relevant.
Compressing The Byte Size Of The Image Files
Compressing a file is one of the easiest and most important ways to speed up a website’s loading time.
Here are two real-world illustrations of the financial impact of slow page loads:
- For every 100 milliseconds (ms) that it took for a page on Amazon.com to load, sales dropped by 1%.
- As the time it took to show search results went up by 500 milliseconds, Google’s income went down by 20%.
It’s recommended that you aim for a file size of less than 70 kBs. When it comes to heavy files that are close to 300 kB, the best you can do is reduce them to 100 kB. If you do this, you’ll get compressed photos without sacrificing quality, and your images will load faster.
If you’re curious about the pixel-to-byte conversion, Google has provided the following handy table. This table will help you learn how much weight a single image can have by looking at its size.
If you realize that your image is too big, no worries. A file-compression website is all you need. Just upload the files there.
A number of high-quality, no-cost programs exist on the web for compressing image files like tiny.png, Kraken.io, WeCompress, and ezGif. You can use any of these web apps for file compression.
Use Alt Text
It is essential to provide descriptive alt text when optimizing images for search engines. It’s only a little bit of text that explains what a picture is about, and search engines use it to figure out what’s in the images.
Including alt text can improve your content’s visibility in searches. It also helps people who use screen readers to understand what’s in the pictures you have put up on your website.
Including descriptive “alt” text allows users of screen readers to understand the content of your photographs. 
Keep the search engines and human users in mind when you are writing an Alt-text. It’s much better for SEO and user experience to write a descriptive text like “Barcelona beach” in the alt text instead of “A white-sand beach on the coast of Barcelona”.
Using Captions With Your Images
Captions are the short bits of text that appear next to your photos, typically beneath them.
Why do captions matter so much for image optimization?
When people quickly look at a website, they look at the headings, pictures, and captions. Therefore, writing these small one-liner below images on a website help make it easier for people to consumer the content that’s on it.
Is it necessary to caption every picture? No, because visuals occasionally have other uses. Keeping in mind the importance of avoiding over-optimization, we recommend including captions only in those instances in which doing so would serve the needs of the visitor.
Don’t add a caption to an image merely for search engine optimization considerations; think about the user experience first.
Add Structured Data
Marking up your material with structured data helps search engines like Google provide more visually appealing search results. If you add structured data to your photographs, Google will be able to display them as rich results.
Google Images is able to accommodate the following three types of structured data:
- Product
- Video
- Recipe
For instance, if you apply schema markup to a picture on a product page and label it as a product, Google may associate this picture with a price label. Search engines don’t have to use an algorithm to find the right image. Instead, they can use the information in the structured data.
Some of your pages may get extra exposure in search results if you use the proper schema markup to have an image appear next to the search result.
In addition, Google frequently uses schema to show a label in picture search results, informing users of the sort of content the visual is for.
How To Build Links With Images Using WordPress?
Optimizing a blog or website by adding a picture that can be clicked on is a terrific idea. It grabs the user’s attention and can send the flow of traffic to a webpage you want it to go to.
Images are typically larger than text, making them more visible to the eye and therefore easier to click.
Here are the 5 steps you need to follow if you want to add links to your images through WordPress.
Visit Your WordPress Dashboard
Adding a clickable link to a picture on WordPress usually necessitates logging in to the admin dashboard.
Enter your name and password, sign in to your Web Hosting Control Panel, and then navigate to your Dashboard.
Visit The Page Or Post Where The Image Is Located
From the dashboard, navigate to the article or blog post that contains the image. You can also do this from your gallery section.
Click On The Picture
Click the image once you’ve located it. When you click on it, a submenu will appear.
Search For The Link Button
On the drop-down menu, there are several buttons. When you place your cursor over them, their names will appear. Hover over each one to find the one that forms a link.
Copy And Paste Your Link
Find the button and press it now. You’ll notice a space designated for a URL, into which you can paste the link you wish to embed. Ensure that the URL starts with “http://.”
Conclusion
Image SEO refers to the steps taken to improve the visibility of a website’s visual content. It can enhance your website’s functionality and boost your content’s search engine rankings.
Some of the most important steps for image SEO include giving your images descriptive names, decreasing their file sizes, and including alt text.
The right use of schema markup helps you have an image appear next to the search result along with price, availability, and review ratings. It may also help increase traffic to web pages.
Remember, image optimization is just a part of the whole package we call SEO. Your images need to be optimized, in addition to the rest of the website and all its elements to see a rise in the search engine ranks.
