How often have you found yourself dissatisfied by the results that come up whenever you perform a search? I have faced this many times. I know that a lot of people abandoned their search at this point. However, that need not be the case anymore. Marketers and advertisers alike have made visual images very important tools in the whole process of providing searched results to a wider audience. Image SEO has now taken center stage.

An excellent trick to use is the optimization of images on search engines like Google and Yahoo. Include good captions, great alt texts, and post high-quality images with well-fitting dimensions. This can contribute massively towards getting a better ranking on the Search Engine Results Pages, which will eventually make your website more discoverable to online visitors.

Here are the top 5 best practices you can use with your website images to become more discoverable:

1. Using SEO-friendly and Relevant Alt Text

An alt text is a short text that best describes what an image is about. They are also called alt descriptions or alt tags. These assist the search engine crawlers in indexing your website better. They describe the contents of an image file. High-quality alt texts help users who cannot load or see the images that they are searching for. With the Alt texts, they can correctly understand what these images are all about. They usually appear on the top left corner of an image box if the image does not properly load.

2. Compress Your Images

It is advisable to compress your images before you upload them on your site. TinyPNG, Compress JPEG, and even Photoshop are great tools that can help you do your compression more effectively. Whichever tool you choose to compress your image files, always ensure that the images’ quality is not compromised. It has been widely observed that compressing your images will help you “shed off” excess weight from your website. What does this mean? By uploading compressed images, you indirectly boost the speed of your website. Pages on your website can load much faster. The most preferred size file size after compression is less than 100kb.

3. Leverage Great Images to Earn Backlinks

Creating original and high-quality images can enable you to garner a lot of backlinks. This will occur when other sites use the photos you have posted in their posts, websites, and pages. If you come up with amazing and high-quality images, other companies, businesses, and sites may often use these images in their platforms and include links back to your site. In the bigger picture, you will get more leads, realize more traffic to your website, and eventually get more clients.

4. Your Images Should be Responsive

It is important to come up with images that are responsive to any type of device. Responsiveness simply refers to an image’s ability to either scale upwards or downwards depending on the size of the device and the screen it has. They should be responsive to both desktop and even mobile phones. Mobile responsiveness is especially highly desirable. Visually appealing and high-quality images can impact the ranking of your site positively. This will place you higher in the Search Engine Results Pages. Images that have a poor measure of responsiveness will affect SEO negatively, your rankings will suffer, and so will the appeal of our brand as a whole. Some web hosting devices can make your images more responsive automatically. Another way of making your image responsive is by using code. Here is an example of a code;

Or Add this code to your CSS:

.responsive {
    width: 100%;
    height: auto;
}

Adding the above code to your HTML will enable you to put your image in a position to be responsive and either be scaled up or down depending on the device used to view it.

5. Use Customized Image File Names

Avoid using generic filenames like “IMG_17” or “IMG_1”, at all costs. Generic file names have a lot of disadvantages. There is a positive relationship between the file name you choose and the ease of search engine crawlers interpreting what your image is about. Come up with a unique and descriptive name for your image file. The days of saving your image files with no descriptions are over. Your file name should be a keyword that describes precisely what is in the image or what the image is all about. If a search engine like Google, Bing, or Yahoo properly understands your image, the overall SEO value improves significantly.

Benefits of SEO Optimized Images

1. SEO-optimized images result in faster speeds of your websites. This, in return, helps you to minimize the bounce rates from your site. This reduces the chances of losing potential clients to competitors with equally good products and services.
2. An SEO-optimized image helps you to rank higher on Google. When you have improved website speeds, Google will generally tend to rank faster websites a bit higher than slower ones.
3. Smaller-sized images will need less storage space on your server.
4. On average, smaller-sized images will use less bandwidth.

In conclusion, though the process of optimizing your images for SEO is a bit involving, the perks that can be realized from this practice are worth it. If you want to have a site that has a lot more traffic and a faster loading speed, image optimization for SEO is the way to go. The efficiency of your marketing strategies is also greatly boosted by the fact that you are using high-quality and SEO-optimized images. All the image SEO best practices that we have discussed above will add to your overall SEO content effort of being discoverable in search results. Whatever products you are selling or services you are offering, use the above tips to help you prosper. They are sure to improve your brand’s discoverability and is an easy way to boost your SEO through image optimization.