How to Optimize Images for SEO (6 Actionable Tips)

Are you looking for the best ways to optimize your images for SEO and drive more organic traffic from Google's image search?

Quality content can increase traffic by as much as 2000%, and images are a crucial part of creating excellent content. Including images relevant to the content improves the overall experience of your website. The saying: "A picture is worth a thousand words…" wasn't created by a fluke.  

Apart from the added visual experience, images are also great for breaking up long text paragraphs and making your content easier to digest. In addition, they can also increase the click-through rate to your website and ultimately help improve your rankings.

But to get Google and other popular search engines to rank your images in image search, you need to ensure that your images are SEO-friendly. So in this post, I'll cover 6 actionable tips to optimize your images and drive more organic traffic from image search.     

The first step in ranking in image search on Google is to optimize your image alt texts (alternative text). It is an HTML attribute added to the image tag and helps Google, and other search engine crawlers better understand what the image is about and show it in image search. 

In plain HTML code, an alt text can look like this:

<img src="img_adorable-puppy.jpg" alt="Adorable puppy chasing a ball" width="400" height="500">

As you can see, the alt text is used to describe your image. And if your graphic can't be displayed, your visitors can still understand what it is about from reading the text. This is also true for blind people who use screen readers to read text and images.

So, an excellent way to optimize your alt texts is to imagine how you would describe your images to a blind person. Use as descriptive alt texts as possible within a character limit of 125 characters to not be cut off by screen readers. 

Also, include your target keyword but don't stuff it with keywords. Keyword stuffing can cause Google to look at your website as spam. 

It's more important than you'd think to name your images with descriptive file names. It gives search engines and users a clue about the subject matter of the graphic.

For example, "IMG00026.jpg" doesn't say anything about what the image is about. But "playful-labrador-puppy.jpg" would let you know the image is of a playful labrador puppy. 

So, try to make your image file names as descriptive as possible, and include your target keyword if relevant to the image. 

You can also use semantic versions of your keywords, but remember that relevance will always be the essential factor to consider when naming your image files.   

Studies have shown that users can recall 65% of visual content even three days after they've seen it. That's why it's crucial to use the correct image format depending on what type of graphics you want to add to your site.

Why?

Because depending on what image format you use, your image file size will be larger or smaller, and the image quality will be good or bad. And you don't want to display low-quality, blurry images on your site or make them so large that they'll take forever to load.

That said, the most common image file types are JPG, PNG, and GIF, and they all serve their purpose depending on the intention with the image:

For example, JPG is best for pictures with many shades of colors, PNG is best for maintaining the image quality, and GIF is best for animations or moving images.

If you're aiming for as small a file size as possible, you should use JPGs. But PNGs are better for drawings, screenshots, and images with text, where you need to keep the image quality. 

Needless to say, if you want to add something that moves on your site, you'd need to use GIFs.

If you're using too heavy images, you'll slow down your overall site speed. This would be detrimental to your SEO rankings since research has shown that 53% of visitors abandoned a site that took more than 3 seconds to load, and only a one-second delay in page load time caused conversions to drop by 7%. 

With too slow page load, your visitors will likely choose a faster loading site and make you lose out on traffic and potential customers. Even worse, since page load speed is a ranking factor on Google, it'll hurt your rankings as well. 

To avoid this, you need to compress large, heavy images and reduce the overall file size of your website. There are free services you can use, such as:

Compressing your images can reduce the image file size by 70% or more, which will significantly impact your site speed.

When creating an image sitemap, you'll help search engines index and crawl your images faster. It'll speed up the process of Google discovering your pictures and hopefully favor them in its rankings. 

Without an image sitemap, Google might not find images that your site reaches with JavaScript code. 

You can quickly create an image sitemap using a WordPress SEO plugin like AIOSEO, Rank Math, or Yoast SEO. 

After activating your image sitemap, your images will automatically be included in the XML sitemap. So, the first step is to enable the actual XML sitemap feature on your website and add it to Google Search Console. 

Like an image sitemap, the XML sitemap is a list of all of your website's content in a machine-readable format. If this sounds a bit intimidating, there's no need to worry because all three plugins simplify this process with a single click of a button.

My final tip for optimizing your images for SEO is serving them via a CDN (Content Delivery Network). 

Using a CDN, like Cloudflare, MaxCDN, or Incapsula, will help speed up your website. The CDN will pick a cached version of your image from the server closest to the user's geographical location. This action limits the number of internet hops it takes to load your image from your site's original server, i.e., your web hosting provider. 

For example, the beginner's guide for WordPress, WPBeginner, got their website to load in just 483ms after using a CDN and a cache plugin. 

Many CDN services offer a free version, but it's worth investing in a paid plan if you want to maximize your site speed and rankings on Google.

And there, you have 6 actionable tips to optimize your images for SEO to drive more organic traffic from image search. SEO-friendly images are essential if you're running an eCommerce business and want to prepare for Google's new image recognition tool, Google Lens. With only a tap and hold on the image, shoppers can see where they can purchase the product. It all comes down to making it easier for users and search engines to access and understand your images.