A webpage is ranked on Google’s search results based on a number of factors. The entire SEO industry is built upon possessing knowledge on how websites can be ranked on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The SEO factors which determine how each of these websites rank high on Google vary. One common factor almost every well-known search engine takes into account while ranking webpages is image SEO.
What is Image SEO?
Image SEO refers to a set of guidelines on how to optimize images on a webpage for search engine discovery. A website that follows image SEO is much more likely to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
Written content in SEO has its own guidelines. Factors like keyword density & frequency, anchor text optimization, internal linking, LSI keywords, unique keywords, and grammar are text-related SEO factors.
Image SEO has its own unique factors. Take any top digital marketing institute and you’d find image SEO being taught to students.
There is no doubt over the fact that images play a key role in enhancing the quality of a given piece of content. A block of text, even for appearance’s sake, seems unappealing. Some of the top search queries in any given niche have top-ranked pages with image SEO-optimal visuals.
Moving forward, we offer some image SEO tips marketers should adopt.
Choose the Right Format
This is an image SEO tip probably everyone ignores, and yet, if followed, can help a webpage rank high tremendously.
Popular image formats include jpeg and png. However, simply adding any image format in any given case is wrong.
- Use png in case you want readers to be able to see the background
- Use jpeg or jpg in case you’re showing a large illustrative picture relevant to the content
- For logos and icons, avoid jpeg. Use svg format which is ideal for small images like site icons and logos
- Use webp in case you want a smaller image size with more or less the same image quality. There are many online image tools you can use to convert jpeg and png to webp
Customize Image Name and Alt Attributes
When a search engine scans your webpage, it doesn’t read the image as it is displayed on the screen. It instead checks its file name and alt attributes.
When adding an image to your content, make sure you rename the image to something relevant to the content. Do the same for image alt attributes. In case you don’t, the search engine would simply take a random image name which would be irrelevant to your text content.
In Conclusion
In this article, we covered image SEO as a topic and gave a few tips on images on a webpage can be optimized.
About the Author – Lalit Pancholi is an SEO blogger currently consulting for a top brand in the telecom sector. He is writing this guest post for DelhiCourses, a well-established name known best for its digital marketing course in Delhi. Lalit learned SEO and digital marketing at Delhi Courses Academy and owes a lot of his success in the field to this best digital marketing institute in Delhi.