How are you going to optimize the images of your website for google search results? Well, here are 5 ways for you to achieve just that.
A website’s success depends heavily on its visibility. Whether you are using PPC ads or optimizing your website to appear on the top of the search results, the visibility of your website is going to determine the success of your website and your business.
While you are going to do everything necessary to increase the visibility of your website, there is one thing you're probably not going to pay that much attention to and that is to optimize the images of your website for google image search.
While optimizing your website for search engine results you also need to make sure that the images of your website are optimized to appear on the search results for relevant queries. In the present day, the audience loves to consume content in image format. And if you are able to provide them with relevant image content then the popularity of your website is definitely going to increase.
So how are you going to optimize the images of your website for google search results? Well, here are 5 ways for you to achieve just that.
Even though internet speed and connectivity are getting better and better with the times, and Responsive web design optimizes the websites for mobile phones, it is still not a valid reason to have an uncompressed image on your website. Not compressing the images before uploading them on the website will cause the website to slow down and delay in image loading.
The fast loading of the image on the website is part of the user experience. The user is not going to wait until the image loads. They will find another alternative to your website and leave your website without hesitation.
So make sure that all the images that you upload on your website are well optimized and compressed. Remember that the images on your website make up the part of your user experience and compromising which means compromising the performance of the website.
Image optimization for the image search results begins even before the web development process. You have to change the file name. This is because when Google Bot crawls your website, it does not read the image or what it contains, but the name of the image file. And as a result, you have to optimize the file name to let the Google Bot know what the image is about so that it can display the image for proper search engine queries.
For example, if you insert this image on your website-
And use the file name “3us6jk”, Google bot will have trouble understanding the image content and as a result, would not be able to display the image for proper search queries. But if you optimize the image name to be “a man holding beverage while reading a book” it will be better understandable for the google bot and it will be better able to display your image for search queries.
Image without context is not only going to confuse the website visitors, but also the Google Bot.
The context of the website images helps Google Bots to understand the image and why it has been used. This understanding is important for your image to rank in the image search results. This is also an important principle of good SEO practice. Make sure to add enough context to the image to make the use of the image meaningful.
If the web design company you’ve hired is using Content management systems such as WordPress, they will be able to add a lot of information for the image, such as title, caption, alt text, and description. All these image details will come in handy to increase the visibility of your website through image search results.
Each of these details, also known as meta-data, have different purposes. For example-
The title is the text that appears when the visitor rolls the mouse pointer over the image
The caption is the small description that appears below the image. The use of this is optional.
The alt text is what appears when the image fails to load. The users would be able to understand what kind of image it is with the alt text.
When it comes to optimizing the images for the website SEO, the alt tag is more important than any of these details. Adding the alt tag ensures that the Google Bot is able to read the image and display it properly. Additionally, for users that can not see the image or load the image will be able to know the content of the image with the help of the alt tag.
Even though it is a lesser-known way of optimizing the website images, it is still an effective way. Page indexing is an important part of SEO practicing. With Image sitemaps, you do the same thing as indexing the pages. With image sitemaps, you highlight the important images you want to appear on the google search results.
However, make sure that you index only a few major images from your website. Indexing all images is not going to help you to leverage the benefits of the image sitemaps.
Optimizing the images on your website is going to not only help you to become more visible to the audience but also get more traffic and increase conversion. So make sure whichever website design services you hire, they keep the matter of image optimization in mind during the Web Design Process.
