Optimize your Images for SEO

You have been religiously optimizing the content on your webpage. But often neglected are the images or photographs used on the webpage. They are added for the visual effect but often under-utilized. Now these very images can get you more visitors, just by following a few steps and help you rank higher on the search engine results.

First let us be clear on why you need to optimize the images. When you see any image, you know what exactly it is; but search engines are not humans and they cannot see. They may be able to make out there is an image on the page but cannot understand what it is about. So they need help on that front. It is up to us to help them by giving an appropriate name to the file and providing it an alt-text.

Suppose the image is a bit slow on downloading, maybe due to a faulty connection or a slow network; then an alt-text helps the viewer see what the image is about. And this alt-text serves as the explanation about the image for the search engine to understand what it is about. By using the appropriate keywords in the alt-text for the image, you can direct the search engine results to your website when someone searches for those words.

Simultaneously by using a descriptive file name we can help the search engines further to understand the image better. Be mindful that you do not save the image in numerical form that digital cameras or your smartphones save it as; as such file names are not descriptive enough for the search engines to understand your images. Give it an appropriate file name describing the image properly so that it is self-explanatory.

The search engines give equal importance to the page speed while ranking the sites. And with the various screen sizes of the medium (computers, laptops, tablets, mobiles, etc) being used by the users, the page speed is becoming increasingly more important in determining the popularity of a site as low page speed may prompt the impatient viewer to navigate away from the website, thereby making it score low on the search engine. The size of the images used on the webpage is one of the contributing factors to the page speed. The bigger the file; the more the time taken. The resolution of the images decides the size of the file. So you need to strike a balance between the quality and size of the images. Optimizing the images can improve the speed of the page download; especially if you have number of images on the webpage. Use the appropriate type of images as per the demand of your webpage; .jpg or .gif or .png files can be used to suit the requirement of your site. To optimize your image, make it a point to choose the suitable quality of image in a lower size.

Even if the images may not help considerably in your business, it can help divert the target audience to your website. So optimize the images that you add to your webpages and help the search engines find them to bring you the viewers and consequently potential customers.

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