Blogging: 10 Image Optimization Tips To Improve Your Blog Posts [Infographic]
Do you know how to improve your blog posts? Do you know how to optimize your images successfully and generate more traffic from Google? Here are some image optimization tips you need to use.
Blogging: Image Optimization Tips To Improve Your Blog Posts
Create infographics Using the right file types Image file sizes Image alt text Descriptive captions Image sitemap Lazy loading Thumbnails
With infographics and images, you can emphasize points in your blog posts and make a greater impact on your readers.
Although people might not necessarily be too apt to read a wall of text, they will look at an image.
Many bloggers know that infographics and images can help people discover their blog on Google or other search engines.
Most of these image optimization tips are “set and forget,” meaning you only do them once and they’ll help your blog content index score over time.
Pro-Tip
How To Improve Your Social Media Marketing and SEO Strategy
How To Improve Your Social Media Marketing and SEO Strategy
Image SEO: 6 Tips on How to Optimize Images to Generate More Traffic
A website with successful image SEO will get more organic traffic. Images with high-quality and relevant alt-text descriptions help readers to understand what your product is about.
But high-resolution images on your website will affect loading time. So these images can drop your website’s position in search engine rankings.
Image SEO: How to Optimize Images to Generate More Traffic
Here are some interesting tips about how to optimize images for search engines that generate more traffic
Optimize Image Size (SEO-Friendly)
Image size should be the best for optimal web performance.
The maximum upload size is 20MB with a resolution of 1024 x 1024. But it’s better to have an image less than 500 KB.
Google’s crawler is unable to read an image beyond this size limit.
A greater size image could delay your web upload speed (which shouldn’t exceed more than three seconds).
Compress Images without Losing Quality
If an image on your website is too small visitors will don’t understand what the image is trying to show.
If you have taken a photo using a simple mobile camera the photos probably will suffer from distortion.
Also, images that are too large slow down a website’s loading speed. It’s best to compress them to ensure viewers have a web-friendly experience while viewing your website.
Optimize Image File Name
The name of the image should describe in text form what is being visualized. Search engines and humans should be making perfect sense of the name.
Phone images and those you download online have different coded names (like DCM0004.jpg).
Instead of using those, make the name more meaningful and search engine friendly. For instance, “SEO-Image-optimization.jpg” is a better name for an image.
Make sure that image file names don’t miss any critical piece of information.
Make Images Responsive to Different Screen Sizes
720-pixel image results in 2 problems for users when viewed over a phone with a display of 320 pixels:
Bandwidth
Website load time
This doesn’t mean you need to upload various sized images to make them screen responsive. You can upload a single image and have them automatically adjust to different displays by using CSS.
So a 1000×600 image can be squished down to somewhere close to 300 x 250 when someone views it on a mobile.
This tip will boost loading speeds.
Optimize Image Alt Text
Alt-text is the second most crucial image description after the image file name.
Alt-text is also used for terms like alt description/alt tags/ alt attributes.
Why Images Need An Alt Text
Sometimes, a filename is not loaded correctly. So, alt text provides an accurate description of the image in the text.
Alt text was designed for visually impaired users who use screen readers to understand images.
Google image crawlers also use it to index an image properly.
So if you want to earn a Google ranking for an image, it is wise to supplement the alt text with Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords.
LSI Keywords allows Google to understand your overall content in depth. They are closely related to the main keyword. They are not synonyms of your focus keyword.
How to Find LSI Keywords
Several tools generate LSI keywords.
You can use Google Suggest long-tail keywords as the source for LSI keywords.
Image Position
Google updated its Image Search algorithm in 2018 and still uses the same approach. Google prioritizes sites where the image is central to the page and higher up.
Search engines tend to rank an image for a particular topic and place it on top of your content.
Google prefers an image that is near the title or below the first subheading. This image summarizes your entire post in one look.
Add value to images with relevant and specific alt text, captions, and titles to make it easier for Google to ”read” your photos.
Image SEO – Explanation
Image SEO referred to as image optimization, image SEO is all about improving your site’s images for two main reasons:
To rank higher on Google Image Search.
To improve the overall visibility and optimization of a web page.
Image SEO (Optimization) will help Google to understand your site’s images. Including correctly naming files, adding and optimizing alt text, reducing file sizes, and more.
You need to know that Google still can’t read all types of images. It is also important to know that image SEO isn’t just about helping search engines to understand what an image shows.
Poorly optimized images are one of the main reasons for slow web pages. Image optimization can help you to load fast your site and your PageSpeed score.
Last Tip
When optimizing images for Google, know that it only reads the associated information in written form (image size, name, alt text, caption, title, position).
It’s essential to optimize your images if you want to rank higher on Google and other search engines. Also, image optimization will help you to generate more organic traffic. SEO Effect!
SEO pros know that optimizing images for your website is a very important tip to success. Image optimization creates many advantages such as better user experience, faster page load, and effective ranking opportunities.
Here are some important image optimization tips you need to know.
Choose the Right Format (PNG and JPEG)
There are many image formats to choose from, the PNG and JPEG are the most common for the web.
PNG: Produces better quality images, but comes with larger file size.
JPEG: You may lose image quality, but you can adjust the quality level to find a good balance.
PNG is the hero of image formatting. PNG is the best way for the optimization of your images.
Compress Your Images
According to HTTP Archive, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight.
That’s why you need to compress your images before uploading them to your site. You can do this in Photoshop or you can use a tool like TinyPNG. TingPNG also has a WordPress plugin you can use too.
Whatever plugin you use, make sure to find one that compresses the images externally on their servers. It reduces the load on your site.
If you’re unsure how your images are affecting your page speed, you can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Create Unique Images
You want your photos to pop on your site. If you fill your website with stock imagery, you’ll look unoriginal – like thousands of other sites that don’t stand out.
Too many websites are cluttered with the same generic stock photos.
The more original pictures you have, the better the experience for the user and the better your odds are of ranking on relevant searches.
Customize Image File Names
When it comes to SEO, creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is crucial.
Image file names alert Google and other search engine crawlers as to the subject matter of the image.
Change the file name from the default to help the search engines understand your image and improve your SEO value.
This involves a bit of work, depending on how extensive your media library is, but changing the default image name is always a good idea.
Write SEO-Friendly Alt Text
Alt tags are a text alternative to images when a browser can’t properly render them. Similar to the title, the alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file.
When the image won’t load, you’ll get an image box with the alt tag present in the top left corner. Make sure they fit with the image and make the picture relevant.
Paying attention to alt tags is also beneficial to the overall on-page SEO strategy. You want to make sure that all other optimization areas are in place, but if the image fails to load for any reason, users will see what the image is supposed to be.
Plus, adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images. Even Google has remarked on the value of alt text in images.
It provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. We use this information to help determine the best image to return for a user’s query.
Page Title & Description
Google also revealed that it uses your page title and description as part of its image search algorithm.
The Google support page states:
“Google Images automatically generates a title and snippet to best explain each result and how it relates to the user query… We use some different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title, and meta tags.”
All of your basic on-page SEO factors like metadata, header tags, copy on the page, structured data, etc. affects the way Google ranks your images.
Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly
Mobile SEO. At its worst, it can give you a high bounce rate and low conversions. But, at its best, it can give you more ranking power and better user engagement.
Problem is, how do you optimize your images for the mobile-first index?
You create responsive images. This means the image will scale with the size of the site whether the user is using a desktop or mobile. It adjusts to the size of the device.
Add Images to Your Sitemap
Whether you’re adding your images to your sitemap or creating a new sitemap for images, you want images somewhere in your sitemaps.
Having your images in a sitemap greatly increases the chances of search engines crawling and indexing your images. Thus, results in more site traffic.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast offers a sitemap solution in their plugin.
Image SEO: How to Leverage Machine Vision – How to Rank Higher
Image search results used to give you the option to “view image” without having to navigate to the site the image was hosted on.
When it started in 2013, sites saw a 63% decline in organic traffic from image results.
Why?
Because there was no need to click through when the image could be viewed in full from within the search results.
And then everything changed. In February 2018, Google decided to remove the “view image” button. Now searchers must visit the site hosting that image directly, restoring image results to their former organic search driving power.
According to some recent studies, this change has increased organic image traffic a massive 37%.
Given image results’ return to value, marketers are asking themselves how they can make the most out of this search mechanism.
So what are some new ways we can leverage tools to better understand how to optimize images for ranking?
To explore this, I decided to see if Google’s Vision AI could assist in unearthing hidden information about what matters to image ranking. Specifically, I wondered what Google’s image topic modeling would reveal about the images that rank for individual keyword searches, as well as groups of thematically related keywords aggregated around a specific topic or niche.
Here’s what I did — and what I found.
A deep dive on “hunting gear”
I began by pulling out 10 to 15 top keywords in our niche. For this article, we chose “hunting gear” as a category and pulled high-intent, high-value, high-volume keywords. The keywords we selected were:
I then pulled the image results for the Top 50 ranking images for each of these keywords, yielding roughly ~650 images to give to Google’s image analysis API. I made sure to make note of the ranking position of each image in our data (this is important for later).
Learning from labels
The first, and perhaps most actionable, analysis the API can be used for is in labeling images. It utilizes state-of-the-art image recognition models to parse each image and return labels for everything within that image it can identify. Most images had between 4 and 10 identifiable objects contained within them. For the “hunting gear” related keywords listed above, this was the distribution of labels:
At a high level, this gives us plenty of information about Google’s understanding of what images that rank for these terms should depict. A few takeaways:
The top-ranking images across all 13 of these top keywords have a pretty even distribution across labels.
Clothing and specifically camouflage are highly represented, with nearly 5% of all images containing camo-style clothing. Now, perhaps this seems obvious, but it’s instructive. Including images in your blog posts related to these hunting keywords with images containing camo gear likely gives you improved likelihood of having one of your images included in top-ranking image results.
Outdoor labels are also overrepresented: wildlife, trees, plants, animals, etc. Images of hunters in camo, out in the wild, and with animals near them are disproportionately represented.
Looking closer at the distribution labels by keyword category can give use a deeper understanding of how the ranking images differ between similar keywords.
For “turkey hunting gear” and “duck hunting gear,” having birds in your images seems very important, with the other keywords rarely including images with birds.
Easy comparisons are possible with the interactive Tableau dashboards, giving you an “at a glance” understanding of what image distributions look like for an individual keyword vs. any other or all others. Below I highlighted just “duck hunting gear,” and you can see a similar distribution of the most prevalent labels as the other keywords at the top.
However, hugely overrepresented are “water bird,” “duck,” “bird,” “waders,” “hunting dog,” “hunting decoy,” etc., providing ample ideas for great images to include in the body of your content.
Here we can see that some labels seem preferred for top rankings. For instance:
Clothing-related labels are much more common amongst the best-ranking images.
Animal-related labels are less common amongst the best-ranking images but more common amongst the lower ranking images.
Guns seem significantly more likely to appear in top-ranking images.
By investigating trends in labels across your keywords, you can gain many interesting insights into the images most likely to rank for your particular niche. These insights will be different for any set of keywords, but a close examination of the results will yield more than a few actionable insights.
Not surprisingly, there are ways to go even deeper in your analysis with other artificial intelligence APIs.
An even deeper analysis for understanding
Deepai.org has an amazing suite of APIs that can be easily accessed to provide additional image labeling capabilities. One such API is “Image Captioning,” which is similar to Google’s image labeling, but instead of providing single labels, it provides descriptive labels, like “the man is holding a gun.”
We ran all of the same images as the Google label detection through this API and got some great additional detail for each image.
Just as with the label analysis, I broke up the caption distributions and analyzed their distributions by keyword and by overall frequency for all of the selected keywords. Then I compared to top and bottom ranking images.
A final interesting finding
Google sometimes ranks YouTube video thumbnails in image search results. Below is an example I found in the hunting gear image searches.
It seems likely that at least some of Google’s understanding of why this thumbnail should rank for hunting gear comes from its image label detection. Though other factors, like having “hunting gear” in the title and coming from the NRA (high topical authority) certainly help, the fact that this thumbnail depicts many of the same labels as other top-ranking images must also play a role.
The lesson here is that the right video thumbnail choice can help that thumbnail to rank for competitive terms, so apply your learnings from doing image search result label and caption analysis to your video SEO strategy!
In the case of either video thumbnails or standard images, don’t overlook the ranking potential of the elements featured — it could make a difference in your SERP positions.
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