SEO is a highly competitive activity where thousands of market players are vying for the top search engine results. Doing everything in your power to help your website reach its goals means optimizing every aspect of your site. Unfortunately, images are often overlooked in SEO, which you should emphasize if you hope to rise in the SERPs.
Optimize Image File Names
If your image comes from a digital camera or even a stock photo website, it may not have a suitable file name for SEO. Instead, choose a file name relevant to what the image depicts while keeping the name as appropriate to the accompanying text as possible.
Use descriptive words that the search engines will pick up and use to rank their image results. For example, if you have a website that deals with travel and your image shows a family in front of the Eiffel tower, you may want to name something like “family-posing-in-front-of-Eiffel-tower.jpg.”
Optimize Image Title
Your image title is different from its file name. Using a CMS, the program will use your file name as the image title. If the CMS does not do so by default, enter an image title in the appropriate field.
An image title isn’t as crucial to your SEO efforts, but every bit of effort that can boost your image rankings should be taken. For example, if you have an e-commerce site, try using a call to action as your image name and split test against other types of image titles. Choose whichever type of title contributes to a higher conversion rate.
Resize the Images
Higher resolution images tend to bog down site speeds considerably. For example, Google and other search engines value site speed and penalize your site if images slow it down. Therefore, resizing your images to clear fast-loading will give you a leg up in the rankings.
Use Alt Tags
Search engines scan your website using crawlers that can understand the text. The algorithm cannot ultimately assign meaning to an image and using alt tags helps the crawler evaluate each image according to your written content. Using alt tags will benefit from offering search engines and image descriptors even if the images cannot load due to a temporary issue.
Add Structured Data
Structured images allow search engines to show your images as rich results. These results are Google search experiences beyond textual aspects. This helps Google display your site’s pages in a wide range of ways that are conventional outside listings.
Optimizing Your Images
Using the power of AI can leverage your images to achieve better results. Contentful offers an innovative platform that provides image tagging and can optimize images in a way that adds synergies to your brand.
As per Contentful:
Machine learning capabilities are growing steadily, covering ever more application fields. Contentful’s flexible, extensible platform offers the perfect foundation for exploring these different AI options.
Gain a competitive advantage in your market by optimizing your images and making them an active part of your SEO efforts.
