The Impact of Images on SEO

Since the dawn of the internet, images have played a major role in SEO. Every day, billions of photos are uploaded to websites; optimising these photos for search engines is essential for website owners who want to increase traffic to their sites. Luckily, there are a number of ways to optimize your images for SEO, and by following these tips you can improve your site’s ranking and attract more visitors. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the impact of images on SEO and provide tips for optimizing your images for better search engine visibility. Does Optimising Images Improve Rankings? Before we jump into answering that question, let’s first answer: what is Image SEO? Image SEO is optimising images on a website so that search engines like Google can read the image. If a search engine can read the image because it is optimised, it will improve the content visibility and rankings. Image SEO includes optimisation of image type, image size, load time, keywords, and alt texts. Alt Text stands for Alternative Text. Alternative text is inserted into the HTML document to tell website users the contents of the image. If someone is blind, the computer can read out what the image contains to the user. If you want to improve your website rankings, optimising images is a great way to start. Improving your loading times, adding alt text, and much more shows search engines that your website has gone the extra mile to improve the user experience. Google looks favourably upon websites that do so and this is likely to result in higher overall rankings. How to Improve Image SEO As we mentioned, search engines are all about improving the user’s experience, this is why they recommend adding images to your website, articles, and blogs. Adding a simple image to a blog, will improve your content and rank your website higher. Before you upload an image, make sure you have found the best image that suits your content. Using original images for your website is better than using stock images. For example, if you’re creating or updating your meet the team page, use an image of your actual team, not a stock image. For blogs, always use an image that is relevant to your content. If you’re trying to rank for a keyword, put that optimised image towards the top of the blog, not randomly placed on the page. The most used image formats are GIF, PNG, and JPEG, unfortunately, they all come with positives and negatives. When uploading an image check the size of the image, if it is over a MB (megabyte) then compress it with a compressor. If you want to optimise the image for speed, any image within kilobytes (KB) is good. But make sure that every image is high quality which will make the website or blog seem more professional and interesting. To improve the image SEO, use the Alt tags properly by describing what is actually in the image. Search crawlers can read this information and process the image. When uploading the image use keywords that describe your image so that it is relevant to your content, do this by adding keywords in the image title and file name. Contact Our Experts for Digital Marketing Strategy Get in touch with our team of Digital Marketing Strategy specialists who have the knowledge and know-how to fully optimise your social media and website, allowing you to enhance the number of leads and conversions your business gets.

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