9 Easy Steps To Optimize Your Website Images for SEO

If you have been trying to improve your brand and website awareness, you’ve likely heard about the importance of good content.

But what about the images that accompany that content?

They can do much more than make your website look good.

Image optimization is a very effective SEO strategy that can enhance the performance of your website, improve user experience, and, most importantly, increase your search engine rankings.

So, you can leverage both content and images to show up in the SERPs for your topics.

In this article, I will discuss some key image optimization tips for SEO that you can use to increase your search engine rankings and boost your website visibility.

But first…

What is image optimization for SEO?

Image optimization for SEO means fine-tuning the images on your website to rank well on search engine result pages (SERPs).

How does it work?

When you do image optimization, you adjust aspects like file size, format, and descriptive tags, ensuring that the images provide more meaning to the topic and page content.

Besides, image optimization also helps your website pages load faster, which is important for ranking and improving your website visitors’ experience.

Image optimization is a very important element of SEO website design.

Benefits of optimizing images for search engines

There are loads of benefits of optimizing your images.

So, if you don’t make time to optimize your images before uploading, here are key reasons why you should start doing that from this moment:

1. Get found online with your images

When you create good images and optimize them right, you can rank with your images in Google Images. This increases your chance of getting noticed.

See below and example of my image on the topic of ‘brand messaging architecture’.

The first result in Google Images is from my website.

Now when people click on it, they get to visit my content on my website!

The actual post used to rank high but now it has dropped. But because of my image SEO, I still get a ton of visits to that page!

2. Your site loads faster

Optimized images load faster, which improves your user experience and search engine rankings.

When you optimize images for SEO, you make them lightweight and responsive to different screens, making them load faster on other devices.

3. More of your audience can access your content

When you optimize your images with descriptive alt texts and keywords, you make the website content more accessible to users and search engines.

Website visitors with visual disabilities can also understand the content of an image by using screen readers, which interpret images with the help of alt texts.

4. Visitors have a better user experience

Google and other search engines value user experience and satisfaction.

So, once users show they’re satisfied with your site, you’re sure to get rewarded with improved ranking.

How does optimizing your images help improve user experience?

Optimizing your images increases your site’s loading speed, and users can understand your content better.

Furthermore, well-optimized images serve as text breakers, which can be helpful when the content is long.

5. Higher search engine rankings

So, with all of the benefits together, optimizing your images for SEO helps you get higher rankings, as search engines love websites that load fast and provide a great user experience.

6. You get more visitors from social

People love to share great visuals. So if you  create images that grab attention and provide value, people will share them, which means you get more visits to your content and website.

Now that you know why image optimization for SEO is essential to your website development process, let’s look at the best image optimization practices.

How to optimize images for SEO: 10 best practices

Optimizing images for SEO might sound like a techy task, but there are some straightforward steps that are easy to implement.

1. Create useful images

The first step in optimizing images for SEO is to ensure they’re valuable and relevant to the content. Images serve many purposes in a piece of content, from helping you break up chunks of text to providing context to the content or helping display relevant data.

If your users find your images helpful, you’ve already won.

The reason is straightforward. The content might be a little complex, confusing, or lengthy, but with the right images, your users will understand it better and stay on your page longer.

So, how do you create useful images for SEO?

Make them unique, simple, relevant, and straight to the point.

Your image can serve as a breather, so it can be something as simple as an infographic summarizing a detailed point you made in the article.

While you can source images from stock image platforms, I recommend you create your images so you can easily rank for them in the image section of SERPs.

For example, I’ve added this image of the image section of SERPs for the keyword “image SEO” just to provide context to this point and help you take a break from the large chunk of text you’ve already consumed.

2. Choose the right file format

If you want your images to display properly on your user’s device, the format of your images should be a huge concern. The wrong image formats can be blurry, too tiny, or too large, or they might not even display at all, which is bad for user experience and SEO.

So, what are the image formats you can use on your content?

Well, there are many available, but here are the most popular ones and why:

• JPEG: Best for photos and images with lots of colors. It offers a good balance between quality and file size.
• PNG: Best for images with transparency and those requiring high quality. However, PNG files are usually larger.
• WebP: Offers better compression than JPEG and PNG without losing quality. It’s compatible with most modern browsers.

Other image formats include SVG, BMP, and GIF.

However, as you can see from the description above, WebP images are the best for SEO. This is because WebP images load fast while maintaining image quality.

And the good thing is, according to CanIUse, 96.3% of website browsers support the WebP image format.

3. Resize your images

Here’s a very important thing to note:

Image size and file size are two different things.

While image size refers to the dimensions of the image, that is, how big or small it is in terms of its width and length (e.g., 1024 pixels by 680 pixels), file size is the storage space of the image (e.g., 100 kilobytes or 1 megabyte).

And both are very important metrics.

You need your images to be responsive and display properly on all devices, so you need to resize your images accordingly.

For instance, if your website’s maximum display width is 1200px, uploading images wider than this is unnecessary and may even affect responsiveness.

4. Compress the image file size

The file size of the images you use affects the loading speed of your website pages. Fast-loading pages provide a good user experience, a key reason why Google and other search engines favor fast websites.

This makes image optimization essential for SEO.

Before you upload images to your website, ensure they are compressed effectively.

I understand image compression is dicey, as it can lead to a loss in image quality. However, some file formats, such as WebP, are known not to compromise on quality, even during immense compression.

There are also tools like TinyPNG you can use to reduce file sizes, just like in the image below.

Whatever tool or plugin you use to compress images, ensure you have a guideline that helps you maintain a particular level of image quality. It’s not user-friendly to find sharp images in one section of your blog, and the others are blurry.

In general, just avoid blurry or pixelated images.

5. Use descriptive, keyword-rich file names

Alt text is not the only place you should add descriptions and keywords.

It also applies to image names.

How do you save your images?

Do you use random names like “myimage01.jpg” and “myimage02.jpg”, or are you more intentional by using keyword-specific filenames like “fresh-strawberries-basket.jpg” or “fresh-juicy-strawberries-in-cane-basket.jpg”?”

While Google doesn’t say image filenames are ranking factors, it does say they’re essential. Google advises that you use descriptive file names, as they help their crawlers understand what an image is all about.

This is even more useful when you upload certain images without alt texts. Your file names become the only way Google can tell what information your image contains.

For example, if your page title is “What is keyword optimization for search engines,” your featured image should be named with the keyword “keyword optimization for search engines,” and other images on the page should have related names.

6. Add descriptive alt text

Alternative text or alt text is an HTML attribute that describes an image.

It is vital for your SEO, as it helps Google understand the content and context of your images.

It also plays a crucial role in enhancing your user experience, as screen readers use it to describe images to visually impaired website visitors.

The best way to optimize your images with alt texts is to make the text descriptive enough and add relevant keywords.

For example, “woman reading book in sunlit garden” tells a lot more than just “woman reading, and also a better long-tail keyword to match the topic of woman reading.”

I would strongly recommend you do thorough keyword research for every page and piece of content and then use keyword-specific descriptions in your alt text. This will help Google understand your images better, especially in the context of a topic.

However, you should avoid keyword stuffing, as it can confuse users and search engines, leading to poor SEO performance.

Here are some alt-text best practices you can adopt to make the most of your image optimization:

• Provide a clear and specific description of the image.
• Ensure to keep the alt text under 125 characters.
• Incorporate relevant keywords naturally into the alt text, but avoid keyword stuffing.
• Ensure the alt text is relevant to the context of the content around the image.
• Do not add alt text to images that are purely decorative, and don’t add information to your content. This ensures that screen readers ignore them when reading to visually impaired people.
• For complex images like charts or infographics, provide a brief description in the alt text and a more detailed explanation in the main content or via a long, linked description.
• Do not start alt text with phrases like “image of” or “picture of,” as screen readers already recognize and communicate to the reader that it’s an image.

7. Enable browser caching

Browser caching happens when your website visitor’s browser stores certain files, such as images, HTML files, JavaScript files, etc., so they don’t have to redownload again each time they visit your site.

This helps improve the website’s performance, speed, and user experience.

Some images on your website can be so large that they cause slow loading times. This is common with high-resolution images like your logo, background images, and other non-compressed images.

When you configure your server to specify how long browsers should cache these images, you help improve users’ experience. To do this, set the appropriate Cache-Control headers in your server configuration and specify their expiration times. Google’s browser caching guide provides detailed information on how you can do this.

There are many tools you can use to do this, such as Fiddler, Yslow and Google Lighthouse.

Websites like WordPress also provide plugins you can use for this effortlessly.

Source: SKT Themes

8. Create an image sitemap

First up, what exactly is an image sitemap?

Think of it as a roadmap that guides search engines to all the images you have on your website.

This is particularly important if your site includes galleries or features that aren’t easily accessible to search engines, like images embedded in JavaScript or hidden behind fancy animations and pop-ups.

Without a sitemap, these images might go unnoticed by search engines.

Creating an image sitemap helps ensure that search engines can find and index every image you deem important.

This could be anything from product photos to featured images in blog posts.

Google allows you to create specific sitemaps for your images to ensure they’re adequately crawled and ranked on the image section of SERPs.

If you’re using a platform like WordPress, there are plugins that can automatically generate and update an image sitemap for you.

For those who like a more hands-on approach or have custom-built sites, you can manually create an XML sitemap for images using sitemap generator tools available online, then submit this sitemap to Google via Google Search Console.

Follow this Google guide on image sitemap generation for more details.

This will help you easily create a sitemap for your images. However, if you use WordPress, you don’t have to stress, as the platform provides many plugins for generating image sitemaps for your website. Here’s a structural representation of a sitemap:

Source: Search Engine Journal

9. Implement lazy loading

Lazy loading is when images or other files like videos are not loaded until they’re needed. In other words, the images do not load until they appear on the user’s viewpoint (visible screen).

Source: Imperva

If your website pages contain many images, you need to implement lazy load if you want to optimize your images for SEO. Implementing lazy loading on your images helps:

• Improve your website’s user experience
• Ensure faster loading of pages, as images do not load simultaneously.

While lazy loading does not directly impact your SEO, improved load times can lead to increased search engine rankings, as Google considers page speed a ranking factor.

Craft effective alt text to build topical authority with related keywords

Let’s say it’s all about gardening.

You’ve got sections on vegetable gardening, floral arrangements, and the nitty-gritty of proper garden tool use.

You can use alt text to tie all these images together under the gardening umbrella to establish authority in the topic of gardening and boost your SEO.

Here’s a breakdown of how to do it effectively:

1. Identify your core and related keywords

Identify the main keywords associated with the topic and sub-topic of your webpage.

For instance, if your main topic is “organic gardening,” sub-topics could be “composting methods” or “best organic seeds.”

Use these keywords consistently across your images’ alt texts related to each sub-topic.

2. Get specific

Use those keywords to tell a mini-story about each image.

Make sure your alt text accurately describes what is depicted in the image while incorporating the keywords naturally.

For example, for an image of a compost bin on a page about composting methods, a good alt text might be “compact compost bin filled with organic waste ready for decomposition.”

3. Keep the context in mind

Align the alt text with how the image fits into the overall page content. If it’s an image of a shovel and the topic is ‘Seasonal Planting Advice’, your alt text could be “garden shovel ready for planting spring bulbs.”

4. Avoid overstuffing

While it’s important to include keywords, ensure your alt text remains natural and easy to read. Don’t force keywords in; instead, focus on making the description useful for readers and search engines alike.

5. Use synonyms and variants

To avoid repetition and to cover more search queries, use synonyms and variants of your keywords.

For instance, alternate between “organic seeds,” “natural planting seeds,” and “eco-friendly seeds” across different images in the same sub-topic.

Conclusion – optimize your images for improved visibility

Effective image optimization can be the spark your website needs to pick up good visibility on SERPs. With a few images ranking on the image section of Google, your website can gain enough visibility to prompt Google to rank it higher on SERPs.

Therefore, you must ensure image optimization for SEO is integral to your content strategy. Thankfully, this article has provided powerful tips for optimizing your images for SEO.

Do you have vital strategies that are not mentioned here? Please share them with me in the comment section.