So what is image SEO? Simply put it’s optimizing your images which improves page loading speed and overall user experience, which positively impacts your SEO. This help to achieve to higher rankings and more traffic to your website.

Sizing your images to improve your SEO and user experience is the art of striking the perfect balance of image quality over image size. While you intent to have your images looking perfect on every screen, they also have to be in the correct format and smallest file size possible to achieve a good page loading speed.

The goal is under 1.3 seconds. You won’t achieve this by taking pictures from your phone and uploading them to your website without any editing. Imagine a large highway billboard. This is what you are uploading to your website when most of the time your only filling up a space that’s the average size of a postal stamp.

This is where compression and file format come into play. If your adding images ten times the size your serving them on your page, it will take that much longer to load the page. It’s that important to get right and it’s only part of the story! There’s tricks like lazy loading images, but that’s out of this scope and we will dive deeper into advanced images SEO techniques later in this article.

Creating SEO friendly filenames is the art of crafting descriptive file names to boost your website’s SEO. It also helps screen readers and search engine crawlers understand your images better. For example, defaultimage007.jpeg is a horrible file name. This would make it hard for anyone to find an image on there local machine, right?. So how would a “robot” or search engine crawler know what defaultimage007.jpeg is?

If it was an image of the newest Air Jordan basketball shoes wouldn’t it make sense to name the file new_air_jordan_shoes.jpeg? May seem obvious now, but it’s often overlooked. Even when uploading a video thumbnail it’s good practice to save the file with an accurate and descriptive file name before uploading.

The goal is not to stuff your keyword in their, but if your following the best practices then creating SEO-friendly image file names, this should happen almost automatically. Just double check your images are not on an auto generated default name.

Understanding the pros and cons of different image formats for SEO. I won’t be taking about GIF’s or those animated images that used to go viral on social media. They are an option but I will spend time on the mostly used file formats for theses examples. The .jpeg image file extension is likely what you’ll be using for images on your website. When the image is something like a logo then PNG or .png would be used as you’ll most likely want a transparent background.

Because the logo is placed on the navigation bar of the website which already has a background, it may not look quite right in most cases. This is because in JPEG format you’ll generally end up with a white background. The file size will most likely be a bit bigger but it is the mostly used option here. Then there is SVG or .svg which stands for scalable vector graphics. These are mathamatical shapes that scale well.

They are harder to create and usually made by a graphic designer. Some are even animated. If you have the resources or know graphic design, you’d probably choose the SVG format for your logo as well. Then there is the new kid on the block called WebP (maybe not so much these days).

It’s was created by Google and you can read more about the WebP file format here. I’m betting since its even faster and it’s a Google product it will become widely adopted soon and favored as a file format to increase page speed and optimize your images even more.

The take away is you will probably be using a .jpg or .jpeg which are the same format for now. These images can also be resized and compressed for an extra increase in file size reduction. You can optimize your JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF and WebP images using a tool like Compressor. It’s free but has a nice pro version that offers advanced compression settings, image resizing, automatic file renaming and more! How cool is that?

Now that we ‘ve gone over the different file formats for images and when they are used, I bet your wondering what’s the best image format for SEO, am I right? It’s going to be the file format the you can compress down to the smallest size while maintaining the best quality.

This will give your users the best looking photos and experience while keeping your page load time as fast as possible. It may differ for a specific cases, but I’m guessing a correctly sized and compressed JPEG, PNG or SVG will do the trick for now as we gradually move into the world of WebP.

So how does image metadata enhance your image search engine visibility? First, we need to find out what image metadata is. Image metadata is information about the image usually created in the production of the image. It may have an image name, an author, time the image was taken and where.

Even showing by what device or location and it’s widely used for copyright protection. That’s great and all but how will image meta data help my SEO? The answer is by finding a balance of strategically describing your images and using only the data you need. For example, if you were doing local SEO then the location the picture was taken could potentially optimize in your favor.

The fact the image was originally taken on a certain date by a specific device probably won’t be needed unless maybe you were selling that device. It comes down to scope of your project and goals. The goal would be only to keep the essential metadata on your image and discard or not use what’s not essential.

There is also the factor of a bunch of useless metadata on your image you may not now about making the file size larger then it has to be. This could in turn slow your page down. Don’t use this as an opportunity to stuff keywords, but as a way to accurately describe the image and use only the necessities. For image SEO purposes it will likely only be a well written image description that will be helpful here.

We touched on this a bit earlier but here are some tips on creating relevant and keyword-rich image names.

🌟 By implementing these image SEO tips and tricks, you can help enhance the visibility of your pages and images in search results, engage your audience more effectively, and ultimately improve your website’s overall performance and rankings. Remember that image optimization is not only about SEO but also about creating a better user experience. 📸🚀

Images can significantly enhance the visual appeal and user engagement of your web content. When integrated thoughtfully, images not only improve the user experience, but also contribute to your on-page SEO efforts.

Here’s a comprehensive list on how to optimize your on-page SEO with images.

The most useful current tools we use as mentioned before is to first use something like Compressor to shrink that file size down. It should look something like this. You can see it saved a whopping 71 percent!

Another super useful tool is https://www.remove.bg/upload.

This tool will remove the background from any image so that it will look like it belongs on your website or profile. You know those websites with images with white backgrounds over a dark overall background looking like it just does not belong? Well we want to avoid that!

For actually creating new custom images or editing the ones you have taken from your phone it’s best to use something like OpenAI. Though you will still need some software to use your API key in to generate the content. This must be bought from a developer. There are plugins for some software one being Content AI Buddy. You will have to purchase the software and fund the API at OpenAI before you can generate some visually appealing images. Once set up you can crank out images pretty quickly and affordably but if your needs are small maybe best to pay someone who already has access to do it for you. Paying for content can add up faster than you might imagine.

In the end the choice is yours but hope this short guide has given you a tip or two to take away from! And if you need some help you can always contact us.