Image Optimization Tips for SEO

Everyone knows that your blog post needs eye-catching images to help capture the interest of the reader. Using the right images can keep visitors on your page longer and generate more traffic. Unfortunately most authors simply upload images without thought to proper image optimization.

Benefits of using images in your content

The goal of inbound marketing is to drive traffic to your website in order to convert them into leads. Including quality images in your content gives your brand the opportunity be more visible on social media. Visibility encourages more engagement and clicks back to your website. Visuals can:

• Help you tell a story
• Project your expertise
• Break up your writing for easier consumption
• Send a message
• Evoke an emotion
• Help raise visibility for your content

But using the image without optimizing it first wastes an opportunity for even more visibility. SEO is not just about optimizing the text on a page. You need to take advantage of all on-page elements that can help drive traffic to your content, both textual and visual.

The next time you are writing your blog post, use these image optimization tips to ensure you get the best results from your images. Let’s review image SEO best practices so your images can help make your content more visible.

Find the right images

Using images just for the sake of having an image in your post doesn’t really help your cause. Your image needs to support the content that surrounds it.

Search for images that are not only eye-catching but also fit in within the context of your website. Use stock photo sites such as BigStockPhoto.com and FreePik.com or free image sites like Pixabay or Unsplash. For more free stock photo options, check out the following list:

• Post from Buffer on 53+ free image sites. 
• Stock Photo Secrets
• 32 Best Sites for Free Stock Photos – The Secret List!

Understand the rules of image licensing such as whether you need attribution or not. Creative Commons Licensing has different levels based on how you want to use them. Know the rules before you use the image to ensure you don’t get caught illegally using a stock photo. The post from Stock Photo Secrets covers Creative Commons Licensing and rates the free stock photo sites based on risk factor.

There are plenty of free stock photo options today. Never, ever pull images from image search and use them – copyright infringement can cost your business thousands of dollars in fines.

Size your images for speed

Page load speed is important to both humans and the search engines. A page with large images loads slowly, causing visitors to quickly hit the back button. This sends a signal to the search engines about the quality of your website, potentially lowering your website’s rank in the search engine results.

But web images don’t need to be large to maintain their quality and effectiveness.

When you purchase an image from a stock photo company or take a picture yourself, the size of the image is usually quite large, maybe 3 to 5 megabytes. This high quality image resolution enables you to use it for more than just the web.

Before you upload your image to your WordPress media library, reduce the size of your image using image compression and resizing. Most graphical editing applications enable image size reduction. If you don’t have Photoshop and are a Windows user, consider:

• Faststone Photo Resizer, a free tool for resizing images individually or in bulk.
• Paint.net, a free image and photo editing software very similar to Photoshop.

I’ve also used Pixlr on my Chromebook to resize images and store in my Google Drive. These products allow you to set various options that can reduce the size and maintain the quality of the image.

Also you can use PowerPoint. I’ve set up templates for my clients that create the right size photos for their blog posts. When you save the slide as a jpg, it is fairly small. 

If you want a cloud-based solution, Canva and Desygner provide images, templates and a design tool to help you out. Both have a free version that may be enough for most small business owners. Their paid plans are very reasonable if you need more than the free option. Both are worth trying out to see which one works best for you.

There are also WordPress plugins that can help reduce the size of your photos when you upload them. However, you should still reduce the size drastically before you upload.

Imagify WordPress plugin is one that I’m currently using on my website that not only compresses but also creates WebP format and serves them to browsers that support it.

For more WordPress image compression plugins, check out this post, 10 Best Image Optimization Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site.

Name the images properly

Many people upload images using their original names, wasting an opportunity to gain more visibility. When you take your own pictures, cameras usually name them using date and time. Stock photos will vary based on the service, but the names they provide will not benefit you. This is one place being lazy has a consequence.

Rename your images strategically using keywords that describe them within the context of your content to help search engines determine relevancy. When you do a search in Google, the images that match your search show up in the results. Make sure your images show up in the image search results by renaming the file to something that makes sense for both the post and the image.

Dashes are more beneficial than underscores for naming your images because search engines interpret dashes as separators and underscores as joiners. In the screenshot to the right, the filename will be indexed for “wordpress image optimization”. If the dashes were underscores, the filename would be seen as one long word.

Use your metadata wisely

We sometimes think of the search engine bots as “human” – i.e. they can read and understand our online content. But when the search engines are indexing your site, they can crawl your site and read your text. But search engines are unable to read images. To help search engine bots understand the relevance of your images to your content, provide descriptive text using the metadata. This information will help them index your images appropriately.

Metadata includes:

• Alt tag – The alt tag text is displayed in place of the image if the image can not be shown or is taking too long to load.
• Title tag – Title tag provides a tool tip when you hover your cursor over a link when the image is linked.
• Captions – Although not directly related to SEO, captions help catch the eye of the reader. Your visitors will scan photos and read captions before they will read content so they stay longer on your page. Use captions where it makes sense.

WordPress makes it easy to fill in the metadata so use keywords in the alt and title tags and quality descriptions for your captions.

Search engines are much better at understanding the meaning of words but are able to make connections between them and other elements on the page. Tying your words and images together using keyword rich metadata provides clear direction for the search engines.

Add image structured data

Structured data called Schema.org helps search engines better understand what your image is about thereby creating a better user experience. Think of it as a vocabulary used by the search engines to understand the content of your website better.

Although using structured data doesn’t necessarily help your website rank better, it does help you achieve a better listing in image search.

The good news is that Yoast SEO WordPress plugin adds structured data to your pages and posts as do quality WordPress themes like Generate Press.

Combine your optimized image with relevant content

Businesses with visual content can use their eye-catching images combined with educational content to make a greater impression on and an even greater experience for the human visitor.

When you provide valuable content that informs, educates and entertains, you gain trust with your readers. This will make them more likely to contact you when they need the products or services you provide.

Image optimization is an easy but important task. Doing it properly can make a huge difference on whether your images get indexed and lead visitors back to your website.