by admin - 17 May 2021

Images and visual designs are something that steals the attention of people within seconds. Rather than reading long articles, people prefer to grab the information in a nutshell from images, and that’s the reason why infographics are one of the leading marketing materials. You try to make the graphic highly visually appealing for the audience but have you taken the efforts to make the graphic appealing to the search engine crawlers? Only when the crawlers understand what your image is about, they display your content on higher ranks of the search results. Here we bring you the importance of Image SEO to market and bring traffic to your website.

 
 
What Is Image SEO?

Image SEO is the optimization of the images and graphics on your website for the search engines to understand what the image is. When you add additional information about your image and make the visual content appealing to the search engine crawlers, they boost your content to a higher position in the search results. Additionally, your image can also appear on Google’s image search. Therefore, image SEO works towards improving the readability, indexability and quality of images on your website to enhance the user experience while boosting the search rankings.

 
 
HOW TO PERFORM IMAGE SEO?

1. 1. Use High-Quality Images

   It’s natural for human eyes to be attracted to visually appealing designs. Try to leverage this human trait and design custom graphics of high quality that look excellent. Try designing unique graphics because stock photos are common ones, and people would have already seen them plenty of times on the Internet.

 

2. 2. Compress Your Images to Boost Site Load Time

   When you click on a website, how long will you wait for the site to load? Will you wait for more than 3 seconds? People want quick results, and they immediately quit from the slowly loading sites. Heavy images eat up the maximum of the site load time, making you lose your potential traffic. Hence compress the images so that the site load time gets reduced to a maximum extent.

   Compressing the image file size will indeed compromise the quality of the image. That brings a tricky trade-off between the two. Compress the image to such an extent that the quality of the image is not compromised. You can check how much load your images are building on your website loading time from Google’s PageSpeedInsights tool.

 

3. 3. Add keywords in Image Title Tag

   If you have performed SEO for your website, you would realize how crucial it is to include keywords in the blogs and other website articles. Similarly, it is essential to add keywords in the image title tag. This makes search engine understand what is the image.

 

4. 4. Optimize the Alt Tag of the Image

   The alt tag is like a description for your image. Write in words what your image is about in the alt description tag. How can alt tags help? Adding a description of the image in the alt tag, makes Google understand what is being conveyed through that image. Remember, search engines like Google understand text rather than images, and hence adding alt tag makes them understand the content of the image.

   Also sometimes, the image displays are turned off by people because of the weak internet connection or to limit the usage of data. In such cases, the alt tag gets displayed on the screen instead of the image and they understand what the image conveys.
   While writing an alt text, make sure you include the keywords that you are targeting reach for, and the readability of the text should be good for both the search engine and the people.

 

5. 5. Add Keywords in Image File Name

   Adding keywords in title and alt tag is done by most of the people, however, one thing they miss out on is the file name optimization. The file name is one other tag for your image that can help in ranking. Make sure you include at least one keyword in your image file name that you upload on the Internet.

 

6. 6. Make the Images Mobile-Friendly

   Maximum of the searches happen on mobile devices like smartphones, hence it is quintessential for the images to be mobile-friendly. Imagine you’re viewing an image on your phone that doesn’t even fit on your screen. How terrible the experience would be, and you might never return to that site! Avoid such user experiences by making the image mobile-friendly.

 

7. 7. Include Images in XML Sitemap

   Including images in the sitemap makes them discoverable, crawlable and indexable by the search engines. You can either create a dedicated XML sitemap for each image or include your images in the existing XML sitemap.

 
 
BENEFITS OF IMAGE SEO

1. 1. Increased Visibility

   When the search engine crawlers understand the content and context of your image, they show up your image for various related user queries on top of search results. It, in turn, increases your visibility.

 

2. 2. Rank Higher on Results

   Sometimes it happens that your website doesn’t rank higher on search results, this deprives you of the maximum traffic you would have got. But if you use efficiently optimized unique images on your website, these images can rank higher on Google Image search results.

 

3. 3. Boost Website Traffic

   In February 2018, Google released an update that removed the ‘view image’ button in the search results. Instead, you must go to the respective website to view the image. It boosts your site traffic indeed. Informational graphics become worth sharing, and when they get shared on social media, the impressions increase and again, the traffic to your site increases.

 

4. 4. Increased Conversions in eCommerce

   People love shopping online these days, and online shopping gets significantly influenced by the visuals present on the Internet. If you are into e-Commerce and with image optimization, you occupy the top spot on image search results, your leads increase, gradually increasing conversion rates and boosting your sales.

 
 
In a nutshell, image SEO can bring you traffic, leads and conversions thereby, boosting your brand awareness and brand value. Here on do not fail to optimize every image you use on your website to exploit the lucrative benefits it brings. You can connect with us as EntitledArts(https://entitledarts.com) is a top digital marketing agency in Hyderabad. Being one of the top design agency in India, we have accentuated most of the brands with visual designs, branding and marketing services. Along with designing stunning visual graphics, we will combine the best practices of SEO to rank your sites higher on search results and boost your performance.