When today almost everything is evolving around the search engine, nearly all of you must have heard about Search Engine Optimization i.e., SEO. But what you must have heard of less and still holds considerable importance is image SEO. Image SEO works exactly as SEO but with respect to images and it helps you optimize your webpage to such a significant extent that when you hire a top SEO agency, they surely ask you to go for it.
In this article, you are going to discover everything important about image SEO. Questions like what is it and why is it important are going to be answered and then you are going to get some useful tips about image SEO that you’d wish you had known earlier.
What is image SEO?
Every person related to digital marketing services knows that images are always valuable for every kind of digital content. It’s been reported that users rely more upon image content as it is easier to grasp and is attractive and appealing in the first place. This simply implies that images add value to your content, increase engagement and attract visitors.
Image SEO simply refers to optimization of your content’s images for search engine results by adjusting numerous attributes such as captions, appropriate file dimensions, alignment, file name, fitting alt text etc. Image SEO helps your content become more discoverable not only on the image result page but also on the whole search result page.
Why is image SEO important and what difference can it make?
Image SEO techniques should be applied correctly, whether you do them by yourself or hire SEO services India. When the image SEO techniques are used correctly, they can make big differences to your website and it’s ranking and can profit you in a very substantial way.
Below described are points which clearly reflect the importance of SEO:
Loading time – The loading time of a site directly depends on the size of the image. If the image files of your content are too big, then your site will load slowly. Adjusting image size is one of the steps of image SEO which makes image size favorable so that it doesn’t affect loading time.
Positive impact on viewers– The images which are SEO-friendly impacts positively to the users and gives an overall positive experience to them. SEO friendly images engage more audience and thus enhance your bounce rate to a good level.
Can make your content go viral – You would never have heard of some textual content going viral, but pictures keep going viral. Pictures that are touching and tell a story are often circulated faster among people, making more people visit your page and broaden the engagement.
Tips to do image SEO like a pro
Add images that are relevant to your content – Images adding profit to your content does not mean that you can fit them anywhere you want. Pictures only add value to the content when they are relevant to it in the first place. Also, while using them, try not to use stock photos as they are already overused and can affect the originality of your content.
Focus on the file name – Google does not see your pictures to check their relevance, but it reads the file name and other information you have shared with the image file. Try using your primary keyword in the file name to give optimized information to Google.
Image dimensions – For good user experience and Google image search results, the dimensions of your image are important to be considered. You may have noticed that images that you find on Google are more wide and less tall. Although Google has not released any guidelines in this regard, this is suggested by experts based on analysis and studies. Also, make sure to save and upload the image file in .jpeg format and graphics in .png format.
Size of the file – The size of the file is directly proportional to the site’s loading time. Bigger the file size, more time it’ll take to load, and slow loading file can leave a bad impact on your site visitors and image SEO. So, the lighter the image file, the smoother it will load. But keep in mind that as you decrease the file size, its quality is also decreased. So scale down the file size up to the point where the quality is not affected much.
Captions – Captions are the small texts that are written under the image. However it is not important to write a caption below every image, it is totally up to your content’s relevance. But when you write it, keep it accurate and try using keywords but don’t unnecessarily stuff them.
Conclusion!
For creating the most accurate SEO friendly content, you just have to take care of a few things in a nutshell. Keep your content good, add relevant images and keep the above points in mind. Following these steps, you’ll start seeing things falling into the right place. Image SEO is not something which can be ignored while you are making your SEO efforts. Thus either do it yourself or hire an SEO team, but never underestimate its value.