Optimizing Your Images for SEO

Every content creator has found themselves wondering whether their web content needs images. Well, the short answer here is always. Images always impact your search engine performance. But, you may forget an all-important step in SEO (Search Engine Optimization): you must optimize your images. Many people put any old image on their new page and call it a day. Unfortunately, this isn’t the best way to do things. Luckily, you can avoid that common pitfall by taking the following steps to optimize your images for search engines.

Step 1 – Find Relevant Images

Before optimizing your image for search, you should focus on picking a relevant image for the content. For example, it doesn’t do you any good to have a picture of an airplane on a legal page (unless your page is about airplane law). The more relevant an image is to your main topic, the more likely that image will contribute to (rather than detract from) your performance.

Step 2 – Pick The Right Image File Type

After selecting an excellent image for your content, it’s time to ensure it is in the correct file format. There are several image file formats to choose from, and each type is better suited for a specific type of image. A list of standard image file types and their proper uses is as follows:

• JPEG/JPG – Jpegs are best used for real-life photographs as several more colors are available. They are also suitable for large-scale graphics.
• PNG – PNG images are best used when you want to preserve the transparency of the image’s background.
• SVG – SVGs are best used for logos and icons that must be scaled to several resolutions.

Step 3 – Losslessly Compress To Optimize Your Images

After selecting your images and saving them to the correct file type, it’s time to run them through some compression. Compression will shrink the file size of your photos without ruining their fidelity. And the faster an image loads, the quicker your page loads. Remember, page speed is an important SEO factor. So, ensuring your images load as quickly as possible is always a good idea.

To compress your images, head over to TinyJPG or TinyPNG and follow the on-screen instructions to compress your images. TinyJPG and TinyPNG are lossless image compression algorithms, so you don’t have to worry about your final product when using their tools.

Step 4 – Use Alt-Attribute Text on All of Your Images

Alt-attribute text is a tag added to images on the web that tells screen-reading programs what a picture is of for the vision-impaired. The goal is to make your page’s content accessible to anyone. Make it possible to access your photos without losing any information you’re trying to present, even if the user can’t see them.

Alt-attribute text is one of those areas of SEO that many people forget about. However, the alt-attribute text is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization. So, before you publish your next web page or blog post, ensure you have used appropriate alt-attribute text for your images. For an example of what that looks like, see the screenshot below.

Let Goldstein Brossard Optimize Your Images For SEO

Optimizing your images for SEO isn’t complicated or time-consuming. However, performing the four steps listed above can go a long way toward helping your page achieve well. If you’d like help optimizing your website’s images, feel free to contact us here at Goldstein Brossard today!