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

Sizing your images to improve your seo and user experience is the art of stricking 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 achive 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 thats 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 wouldnt 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 extentsion 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 mathmatical 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. It’s 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 im guessing a correctly sized and compressed JPEG 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 take or where. Even by what device or location and it’s widely used for copyright protection. Thats 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 help. 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 esssential 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 filesize larger then it has to be. This will 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 be a well written image description that will be helpful here.

Here are some best practices for optimizing your page images for search enegines

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 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 guide on how to optimize your on-page SEO with images.