SEO Guide to Images: What Are the Best Practices?

SEO is one of the most complex things. We all tend to forget certain essential steps. However, everything is important and helps boost your website SEO like optimizing your images .

Among all these things, taking the time to optimize your images is a simple and important step. Indeed, this will make your site more competitive on search engines.

Most of the time, when we reference a website, we are primarily optimizing the text and doing our best to find suitable keywords for it. However, images have an important role to play in your site's SEO .

Take the example of a Word document. The document will certainly not make you want to read it to the end if there is only text on several pages. On a website it is the same. It has been proven that visitors are more likely to stay on a website that includes images. In addition, our brain also works with visual memory and it is easier to remember an image than a text.

Because of this, images remain an integral part of your website SEO . This is one of the essential things for the SEO of your site. Moreover, it is an integral part of Google's algorithm .

However, for this to work, you need to optimize the images. Indeed, where visitors will only see an image, Google will also see text. The text will help the Google robot to get an idea of ​​the content of your image.

It is good to know how to optimize and reference images on Google . Keep these few tips with you because you will find them useful.

It is necessary to have an image related to the content of your article or your page. Indeed, an image unrelated to your content will sow doubt with your visitor. Additionally, if your image is blurry or poorly framed, it can negatively impact your site.

Do not use images to which you do not own the rights. You can find many websites that offer free images that you can use. It is essential to devote a little time to find the image to insert on your article.

This is a simple step to reference images, however it is often overlooked.

It is essential to personalize the name of the file . Replace it with something relevant on your page. It can also be a keyword. Visitors will never see the filename, however this will help the search engine by giving it more information about your content.

The .alt tag is not visible to visitors, however it is clearly visible to spiders from major search engines. You can define an alternative text for each of the photos that you will put online on your page. This text is an extension of your image and allows you to report its content to search engines.

Adding the keyword and an explanatory sentence will therefore lead to better SEO. If you are using a WordPress-based site, you will be able to fill in the alternative text field for this purpose.

This is certainly the trickiest part. indeed, like everyone else, you want your images to be beautiful and of high quality. However, you do not necessarily want them to be too large, at the risk of considerably slowing down the display of your website pages. Indeed, as we have often seen, the display speed of your site is a significant factor in its ranking on the main search engines.

The size and weight of an image can greatly influence this. In the context of using a CMS such as WordPress, it is possible to resize your images very easily.

It is possible to make your website faster just by resizing your images . Programs such as Gimp or Adobe PhotoShop allow images to be saved for the web to help reduce weight.

There are three types of files, but what's the difference between each one? Understanding the different types of files will also help you decide which one is best for your website.

• JPEG : This is one of the most common formats. This is because it uses a small size which can be perfect for a website.
• PNG : Offers very high resolution and is ideal for an image with a transparent background. The downside is that it is heavier and can therefore slow down the display of your pages.
• GIF : Does not support a wide choice of color. However, it can be a good choice for moving images.

Google encourages website owners to submit the sitemap in order to help the crawler better crawl and rank web pages. It is also possible to include images in the sitemap.

As part of using a best CMS such as WordPress , you can install plugins to generate sitemaps for images. Indeed, Google Image Sitemap and Undira All Image allow you to create this. Giving clear information to Google about the images on your website will thereby increase your site's SEO.

If you have a large site with a lot of images, it may be tempting to want to host these resources on a third-party site . However, this can present a risk, especially if the site concerned is saturated with web traffic. Indeed, if the third-party site is saturated, this can have an impact on the display of your images.

Therefore, it is always best to host the images on your own website using the tips provided above regarding image optimization.

Referencing images remains simple. However, very few sites do. By taking a little time to find the right image and optimizing it, you will most certainly increase traffic to your website.