Did you know that just like optimizing your texts, your images need to be optimized as well?
Many marketers download their images from various copyright-free image sites and upload them directly to their websites without customizing them at all.
But in doing so, they tend to forget that using copyright-free images is not the only thing you need to consider when using image files on your website.
There are several other important factors to remember as well when using images in your posts and pages. The most important one is to optimize them for search engines.
Optimizing your images properly can attract massive traffic to your site and boost your website ranking. When you have more traffic, it becomes a lot easier to reach your conversion goals.
But how do you optimize your images? Here are 4 powerful SEO tips for your images to boost their visibility and attract more traffic.
1. Customize your Image Name
The first important thing to do when uploading an image to your website is to customize its name. No matter how smart Google may appear to be, you need to remember that it is just a machine that acts according to the instruction you give it.
So if you make a Google search for roses, it will display various images of beautiful roses for you. But in reality, it doesn’t know what roses look like. What it actually does is fetch all images with the word rose or roses as its name and alt tags and then display them to you.
So if you add an image of a dog and add its name as rose, Google won’t know that it is actually the picture of a dog. And it will quickly display it in a search made for roses.
The same can happen to your images if you don’t optimize them for search results. So make sure that you add the right name to your images every time you upload one. This will ensure that it appears in the right search results, thus increasing its visibility.
2. Use SEO-friendly Alt Tags
Adding relevant alt tags or alternative tags is another extremely important step to consider to make your images SEO-friendly. These tags are used to describe the content of the image file. So if a user looks up a particular image and, for some reason, it fails to load, they can understand what the image contains by looking at these alt tags.
Another very important use of these tags is that it improves the accessibility of your website. So even a visually impaired user who uses a screen reader can know what your image is about.
Web accessibility is now a major ranking factor for Google. And adding relevant alt tags to your images is one easy and effective way of doing it to improve your visibility.
3. Make your Images Mobile-friendly
Are your images mobile ready? If not, it’s high time to start optimizing them for mobile screens. Most internet users have a mobile phone, and they will definitely use it someday to visit your website.
If your website and images aren’t responsive to mobile devices, your visitors will not give a second thought before opting out of it. This will contribute to boosting your bounce rate, which in turn will negatively affect your SEO.
If you don’t want that to happen, make sure your images are mobile-ready. This means that your images will scale according to the size of the device your user is using to visit your website. So your images will look equally good no matter what device they are viewed upon.
4. Compress your Images
Many marketers forget to compress their images before publishing them on their websites. In doing so, they ignore the damage that can happen to their site.
All high-quality images have a very high resolution. And uploading such images can put a lot of weight on your website. As a result, it will slow down your loading speed and affect your website performance.
People hate slow sites. And they won’t hesitate to opt-out if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load. This means instead of attracting more traffic, it will only contribute to chasing them away.
If you don’t want that to happen, start compressing your images now. There are several tools that can help you do that without compromising on its quality.
So these are some of the ways how you can optimize your images for more visibility. Once you know how to make your images SEO-friendly, attracting solid traffic to your site becomes super easy.
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