If you are in the process of optimizing your new website or wondering why your current site isn’t bringing in the traffic you’d like, you may want to consider image optimization.
Before talking about the significance of image optimization for your search engine rankings, let’s talk about what it means.
The two primary aspects of image optimization
Adding relevant keywords in image captions, descriptions and alt tags
- Adding keywords to your images can increase the likelihood that you’ll generate new traffic to your website. Keywords can be added to your images using “alt text“.
Resizing images
- Search engine algorithms make ranking decisions based on several factors, including, but not limited to, the speed and functionality of your website. To maintain optimization and increase the speed of your pages, keep images small or compressed.
Is Having Optimized Images Absolutely Essential?
Image optimization is not a mandatory component of SEO but it can be beneficial for websites that rely on imagery throughout their content.
For websites that don’t rely on images and only use them for design purposes, image optimization will play a smaller role in SEO.
If visual content is completely irrelevant to your website, including it simply for the sake of aesthetic can hamper page performance.
How to Optimize Images on Your Website
- In addition to alt tags and descriptions, try adding keywords to the actual file names of your images before uploading them. Search engines crawl file names, which gives you an opportunity to improve your SEO.
- Use the right file types. For logos, drawings and text-based images, use the PNG file format. For photos, the JPEG file format is ideal. If you need very high-quality images, the TIFF file format is recommended, though these can take up a lot of storage space because of their size.
- Keep decorative images to a minimum and skip alt tags for these to avoid ‘over-optimization’.
Images are a significant component of web design. As for whether the same stands true for SEO, it depends entirely on the type of website and traffic it hopes to attract.
