Images are crucial to ensuring that your content is more accessible, attractive, and engaging to users, but they’re equally important in terms of SEO.
First, they give search engines important contextual information. Second, optimized images speed up page loading, which increases user engagement and searches engine rankings.
There are many factors that contribute to showing up well in search engine rankings, one of the most important of them is on-page optimization. On the page, Optimization is the pillar of your SEO and one of the important on-page optimization factors is image optimization.
Image SEO optimization is one of the building blocks of on-page optimization. Images are a strong visual component of a webpage. They say that a ‘Picture is better than a thousand words.
You want your photos to pop on your site. If you fill your website with stock imagery, you’ll look unoriginal – like thousands of other sites that don’t stand out.
Too many websites are cluttered with the same generic stock photos.
Think about a corporate website, a consulting firm, a business that prides itself on customer service. All these websites use virtually the same looking stock image of a businessman smiling.
Google is pretty big on mobile, going as far as to create a mobile-first index.
This means you need to account for mobile with your images. By scaling down large image files, you can increase page speed, which is crucial for mobile viewing.
Pages that take longer to spool often suffer a high bounce rate due to the swift departure of eager visitors seeking an immediate solution. Use a smaller, high-resolution image of your product and offer visitors the option to view an enlarged image.
Image SEO is the sum of a number of elements. With Google getting better at recognizing elements in images every day, it makes sense to make sure the image and all its elements contribute to a good user experience as well as SEO. It would be foolish to try to kid Google.
