Images are important to have in your website, it creates a better experience for the user when he surfs through your web pages. Your images can also get picked up by search engines and ranked in the search engine’s “images” section. It is important to optimize your images because a user that will find your image will probably go to your website for more images and info on those images. Through personal experience with our SEO campaigns, I could say that image optimization is fairly important. As we all know, search engines don’t have eyes, therefore they can’t see images. It is up to us webmasters to make them as visible as possible to search engines. Here are a few techniques to help you out.
Image Caption Text
Adding a caption to your image is important. It helps the search engine understand what is being shown in the image. This increases your image’s visibility. Make sure to include a good caption and a relevant one as well to your image. This also helps for your images rankings because a search engine will note that there is relevancy with your image, caption, and content.
ALT Tags
Have you ever hovered over an image and a text appeared. Well that is an ALT tag. ALT tag is like an alternative description of the image. Let’s say you post a weird looking picture that nobody will understand what is being displayed, the ALT tags helps explain it. An ALT tag was mainly made for humans and search engines understand an image. So make sure to include a good description of the image.
Image File Name
Always save your image file name as keywords. Don’t ever save a long image file name all mixed up with letters and numbers. Rename the file with a short description including some of your keywords. Remember to stay spam-free in your file name. This is an important procedure for image optimization. This, along with the ALT tag and caption, make your image visible to the search engines. Even though the search engines will never physically see the image, with the file name, ALT tag, and caption, they get an idea of what is getting displayed.
Crawler Friendly Images
Sometimes, search engines can’t crawl your image’s folder because it is blocked by the configuration you made in your robots.txt file. Make sure that you let your images get crawled by search engines. Even if you have perfectly completed the three steps above, but you block the search engines from having access to your images files, it is as if you haven’t done anything.
Image Size
We know that the page download time is important for SEO. If your page takes too long to load, the search engine will note that and will maybe affect your rankings. Now, the bigger the image, the bigger the loading time of your page. Optimize your image size to meet the minimal loading time possible.
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