How to get more clicks on your images?
Priorly published in Zarget
Dial-up internet is gone. Loading an image doesn’t take up entire summers any longer. Times have changed and we are here with our sassy smartphones scrolling through media-rich feeds all day long. With images taking center stage, it’s imperative for search engines to take notice. Image SEO tips are everywhere but the truth is that search engines can’t process and identify what images are!
Why obsess with images now?
Take a look at this article written by one of the best-known psychology professors in the field of technology — Larry. D. Rosen. He talks about ‘phone intrusion’ being a real matter to consider.
A thing to note — Our lives as marketers revolve around human psychology! We ought to understand the human mind to be able to market our product better.
This infographic about phone addiction stood out of all other posts I had seen so far! Interesting info!
It’s better to be aware of whether or not the way you use your phone looks weird to outsiders.
Image Credit: brandwatch.com
With the world becoming increasingly biased towards smartphone usage, the consumption of media has shot through the roof. Optimizing images for improving your SEO results has therefore made it to the ‘To-do list’ rather than staying on the ‘Wishlist’.
All these unexpected places, let alone the sandwich breaks because our tiddly thumbs are tired already!
But, beware, a mistake you make while setting your image SEO might miss out on a potential-modern-entrepreneurial-millennial.
Insider tip:
If you don’t find a way to do your own images. There are many other options for you to take images from.
These are the sites that offer free stock photos for blogs. Curated by Canva (Canva Team)
And this blog is a collection of the Image SEO tips that will help search engines take notice of your images.
Image SEO Tips
Choose the right format
The following image types are the most used formats on the web for so long now.
JPEG
- Almost 73% of websites on the Internet make use of pictures in the JPEG format. And the most interesting fact about this format is, it can exhibit millions of colors. Thus JPEG goes to be the classic choice for displaying photography on the web.
- Also, JPEG files can be compressed greatly, up to 60% of the original file is adequate to reproduce similar levels of quality. Beyond that, the image files may lose their quality.
- On top of all these, every internet-enabled device embraces JPEG images, which makes it a lot easier to use it on the web.
Seek advice from the following article if JPG is your grab.
It’s always essential to know the working design principles before starting on building a website on your own.
So, here you go — What Image Format Should I Use on My Website? by fatrabbitcreative. (A real fat insightful article actually!)
PNG
- The PNG format comes in the lossless form that supports almost any level of transparency which makes it easy to create terrific looking sites.
- PNG files cannot be used for animations, unlike GIFs. Also, their file size can get fairly huge.
More from stackoverflow here about lossless and lossy image format…
SVG
- SVG is the best format for websites that are dynamic. It generally is an XML- based vector file type. Also an awesome choice of graphic format, especially for icons, logos et cetera.
- SVG file sizes are changeable that we will be able to compress or decompress the file without degrading its actual quality.
- It comes with too much accessibility, that an SVG file code can be customized using CSS.
Give an informative filename
When saving an image from google, instead of directly dropping it onto your desktop, you rename it for locating it easily later on.
The same way, to make an image look more appropriate to the content, name it informatively. Add succinct information to the images to make each of them well briefed — this is perhaps the most important of all image SEO tips!
The more appropriate your image names are to your content, the better your content will be received.
Filenames are precise to allow your readers to identify or relate the images with your topic/content. Also, search engines crawl this information and indexing is done for your images according to their filenames. This will boost your SEO ranking.
Mind the ‘alt’ text
The most sloppy mistake anyone could do while using an image is missing out the ‘alt’ tag of it. Alt tag is displayed when the image is not available to load for the user visiting the page. Search engines crawl the alt tags too, trying to get more information about the image.
Three main reasons why you must never leave the alt tag field abandoned,
- Bots scan for text, but cannot interpret images. They use the alt text of the image to index for use in search engines.
- Without it, you are missing a keyword opportunity. Also, if search bots can’t find the alt tag relevant to the user’s request, it chooses some other image instead.
- Also, alt tags come in handy for users who have disabled images on their browser or the visually impaired who use accessibility tools which pick and narrate the alt tags.
Just another interesting add since it’s all about image SEO tips here.
We know that computer vision is hot and trending for a while now!
Be it Google, Facebook or whoever, everybody is trying to make the most out of computer vision technology, and are trying hard to make the life of ‘visually impaired’ pain-free.
Heard of anything that’s more like Shazam but for images? Here it is!
It’s called ‘What The F*** Is That Bot?’
For ex:
With the power of AI, identifying and analyzing alt tags gets, even more, easier for wtfitbot.
Other conditions to filling the ‘alt tag’ are,
- Keep the text limited to 10 words or less
- Must be a keyword-rich phrase or a single word
- Follow the same rules as for the article’s title/headline
Still clueless? Use Google’s very own Rule Book
Luckily, we have a stronger resource for image SEO optimization with ways to prioritize the appropriate images, tag and describe them right and design it beautifully for all resolutions.
Here’s the rule book by Google to help you create and publish images that are more relevant to your readers.
Let me ease you up a bit more!
Now with all the image SEO tips you imbibed, you might want to instantly get access to the image SEO tools.
Here is the list of 8 tools you can take advantage of,
Seositecheckup — Meta tag analyzer, Google search results preview, Most common keywords test, Related keywords.
Contentforest — Check image Alt texts
Seochat — Analyses page images and links attached
Varvy — Image SEO and optimization
Durham University — Alt text checker tool
Small SEO Tools — Check image path (Reverse image search)
Visual-SEO — Bulk check image ‘alt’ attribute
Seo image — Check keyword density, URL character length
Aforementioned concepts are to SEO optimize your images for better performance.
But, here is one — Piktochart, if you are not yet ready with an image or haven’t designed any at all.
Yeah, so it’s known that the relevancy between images and written content means a lot when it comes to SEO and attaining bulk readership.
One way to make the most pertinent images for your content is to do it on your own.
Check out Piktochart — a tool to create powerful infographic without seeking any designers help.
Here is how it works,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdRMqJWyvik&feature=youtu.be
TL:DR
Being lazy doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the goodies! This is what I’ve been ranting about the last few minutes…
Choose the right image format
Give a descriptive file name
And for heaven’s sake — Mind the ‘alt’ text
Voila!
Knowledge of the above-mentioned ideas is required to understand and set up an SEO applied image strategy for your website. For your venture to be profitable, financially or otherwise, your website goals need to be met with the traffic driven by SEO.
Here is an e-book by Behave and Zarget in explaining how to boost your website conversions.
If you have applied any other image SEO tips or techniques, do share it in the comments section. Ciao.
