Optimize Images For Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

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It’s not compulsory that optimizing your blog’s text using meta tags, meta keywords or meta descriptionany other method is the only way to increase theSEO value of your site. Image Optimization Contributes a very big part in your on-page SEO. Moreover, it can can also generate Tons of traffic from Image Based Search Engines e.g Google Images. Image Based Search Traffic? How? Let’s takeGoogle Images for Instance; A person searches for“Italian Food”. Google will show up all the results on their SERP including Web, Video, News and Images related to the query keyword. According to a very popular theory “A picture speaks a thousand words” one would surely like to check the images too along with the main content he was looking for. And this will result in the increase in organic traffic to the site which in turn increases your Alexa Rank.
So let’s see how one can optimize images for better SEO. Check Below ;-)

How to Optimize Images for better SEO?

One can easily optimize images. All you need to do is to keep some little things in mind while naming and uploading images. Let’s see how?
1. Optimize File Name
Before you upload your image, pick a descriptive file name preferably a file name you want that image to rank for because it will help with your search engine rankings.
For example, if you want to see this in action, just do a sample search and view the images that rank. They almost always have the keyword you searched for in their file name.
2. Optimize File Size
You all know that page load time matters a lot for SEO right now. So, to make sure that your images don’t torpedo your fast load times, make the image file size as small as possible (without sacrificing quality, of course).
DO NOT let your browser resize a large image to look smaller.
When you have a large image, input height and width tags on that image to make the image smaller.
To solve it, always use an image editing program to make your image a desired size, and upload that.
How large should my Image files be?
A good rule of thumb for e-commerce images is to try to keep your image file size below 70 Kb. That can be difficult sometimes, especially for larger images.
3. Optimize Alt Tags
Alt Tags are text alternative to images when a browser can’t properly render them. Even when the image is rendered, if you hover over it with your mouse pointer, you can see the alt tag text created for that image (depending on your browser’s settings).
The alt attribute also adds SEO value to your website. Adding appropriate alt tags to the images on your website can help your website achieve better rankings in the search engines by associating keywords with images. As a matter of fact, using alt tags is probably the best way for your e-commerce products to show up in Google Image and web search.
To include it, simply add  alt=”this is your alt text”  to your image tag.
Let’s take a look at the source code of an alt tag:
<img src=”baby-crying.jpg” alt=”Baby Crying” />
4. Use Image Sitemaps
If your site uses JavaScript galleries, image pop-ups or other “flashy” ways to improve the overall shopping experience – Google image sitemaps will help you get your images noticed by Google.
Web crawlers can’t crawl images that are not called out in the webpage source code. So in order to let them know about these images, you must list their location in an image sitemap.
Image Sitemap
Google has many guidelines for image publishing to help your website rank high on the search engine that you can view here. In addition, you can use the extension for images on Google Sitemaps to give Google more information about the images on your website, and doing this can help Google find more images than what would be conventionally found through their search engine.
Although using Sitemaps doesn’t guarantee that your images will get indexed by Google, you can absolutely increase the optimization of your website, and especially the images by using Sitemaps.Google Webmaster Tools has many suggestions for correctly formatting your Sitemap and the images for your Sitemap.
On Google Sitemaps it is important for you to add specific tags for all the images. You can also create a separate Sitemap to list images. What is important is to add all the necessary information, while using specific tags, to any Sitemaps you have or will create. Follow these guidelines that Google suggests when creating a Sitemap with image information.
5. Optimize Image Hosting
One of the most important part of image optimization. It plays a very important role as it decides the load time of images on the page. If the image is hosted on some external source such as Cloud Storage services then your image load time on the page increases. So to overcome this problem we have to host images on blogger itself.

Done!

That’s All! I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any doubt or query related to this article then feel free to post it in comments below :-)

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