Image SEO: How To Rank Your Images & Earn Links
You know that images are important for SEO, but did you know that images hold a lot of SEO value on their own?
Images can acquire backlinks, and you can earn traffic by appearing high in search results in Google Images.
In this post, you will learn what image SEO is, why it’s important and how to optimize images for SEO.
What is image optimization SEO?
Image SEO is a subset of search engine optimization in which you optimize images on a web page rather than text, or more likely, alongside text.
When you enter a search query into Google, you see quite a few images depending on the type of query you entered.
Local searches will show images from businesses. Product-based searches will show product images.
Certain searches will also return a few image results in the main search tab as well as featured images for individual results.
Of course, images also appear in Google’s image search tab.
If your image ranks above the rest, you’ll earn quite a bit of organic traffic from this tab.
Images also have a possibility of earning you backlinks.
When another site writes about a topic you created an image for, they may add that image to their site, then link back to the page they found it on.
This creates more backlinks for your site and increases your organic traffic.
Finally, the work you do to create optimized images will help optimize your entire page, helping it rank for whatever keywords you want to target.
How to improve image SEO
1. Use the right image format
According to Google, the company accepts the following image formats in search: PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG, WebP, BMP and AVIF.
However, not all image formats are created equal. For web pages, you should typically only use PNG, JPEG, GIF, SVG and WebP.
Here are quick guidelines on when to use each:
- PNG – Screenshots, images with text and graphic overlays, and transparent images
- JPEG – Images shot with a camera
- GIF – Animated images, and images that display graphics
- SVG – Images that need to be scaled at different sizes, such as logos and icons
- WebP – A modern, web-friendly image file format that allows for more image compression without losing quality. It’s mostly used as a conversion option for large PNG and JPEG image files
2. Optimize image file names
When Google crawls your page, it’s able to read the file names you give to your images. The text provides context as to what the image depicts, which helps search engine crawlers attribute the image to search terms related to it.
For this reason, it’s best to use file names that are descriptive instead of the default “IMG_” file name your camera creates.
Here’s an example image:
And here are a few descriptive names for this image:
- construction-worker-radio
- construction-worker-walkie-talkie
- male-construction-worker-talking-on-radio
Place dashes between each word to make the name easier to read.
Finally, keep the name as short as possible, and try to include a relevant keyword.
If your seed keyword isn’t descriptive enough, do a bit of keyword research with SE Ranking to find related keywords.
3. Use short yet descriptive alt text
Alt text and image titles are things you can add to your image with your content management system (CMS), such as WordPress.
In most cases, you can use your file name as an image’s alt text.
Just be sure to put it in sentence case. This means “male-construction-worker-talking-on-radio” would become “Male construction worker talking on radio.”
Not only does alt text provide context to search engines, it replaces your image in case it breaks for some reason and can’t display.
In this case, your reader will clearly see you were trying to depict a male construction worker talking on a radio.
4. Resize images
Optimizing images is an important facet of image SEO. Making files smaller will optimize them for the web, and in turn, SEO.
Sometimes making an image file smaller is as simple as making the image itself smaller.
This works best with JPEG files, but you can try to resize any image to see if you can make its file size smaller while preserving image quality.
Use whatever image editing software you regularly use. It should have a feature you can use to make your image smaller. You can also use an online tool.
If you’re using a template or theme built for your CMS, check to see if the developer has guidelines on image size.
If not, you should be okay with an image size that’s the same size or a little bigger than the container width of wherever you’ll be inserting your image. This is because most CMS’s are capable of resizing images automatically.
5. Compress images
Google wants to promote web pages that perform well and load quickly. This allows it to meet user expectations.
These rules also apply to images.
Image compression is another technique you can use to make your image files smaller so they load quicker.
There are multiple ways to compress images:
- Image editors, such as Photoshop and GIMP, allow you to compress image files before you export them
- Online tools, such as TinyPNG, allow you to compress images in bulk
- NitroPack is an optimization tool that includes image compression. It’ll compress every image on your website
6. Create responsive images
Just as your images should resize automatically to fit whatever container width they’re inserted into, you should also ensure they resize automatically depending on your visitor’s device.
This is called responsive design, a subset of web design that ensures every element on your page is mobile friendly. That is, your website appears normally whether your visitor is on a laptop or a smartphone.
Fortunately, if you’re using a CMS, such as WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or Shopify, your theme or template should be responsive right out of the box.
7. Use a content delivery network
This is another technique that will vastly change how fast images load on your site.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of computers that store copies of your content, including images, on what are called proxy servers located around the world.
This allows you to serve your content from servers that are closest to your visitors rather than serving them all from your origin server.
It also protects your site from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which are orchestrated attacks that take your site offline by flooding your server with an overwhelming amount of internet traffic.
If you spread that traffic across proxy servers located around the world, you have a much higher chance of sustaining DDoS attacks, which means your images won’t go offline, either.
If your host doesn’t offer a CDN, install NitroPack on your site as they have a CDN that’s powered by Cloudflare, the web’s leading CDN provider.
8. Enable lazy loading
By the time you’re done creating your landing page or blog post, you’ve probably added quite a few images to it.
By default, your visitor’s browser needs to load every single one of these images before the entire page will load.
However, if you enable lazy loading, your visitor only needs to load the images that appear in their viewport. All other images will only load if your visitor scrolls to the part of the page they’re featured on.
This helps them load faster.
WordPress enables lazy loading automatically, but you can also accomplish this with NitroPack.
9. Enable browser caching
Browser caching is another web design practice that improves page speed, including the speed at which your images load.
Caching stores copies of your images and certain files and scripts in your visitor’s browser so your site loads faster the next time they visit.
There’s also an additional layer of caching you can enable called prefetching in which your visitor’s browser anticipates a visit to certain websites and “prefetches” a cached copy of that site’s content so it can load the site quicker when your visitor does happen to land on it.
Your host might offer caching, but this is yet another feature you can enable with NitroPack. You can find other plugins in Blogging Wizard’s article on WordPress speed optimization plugins.
10. Monitor broken images
Visitors can’t view broken images, and search engine bots can’t crawl them.
For this reason, it’s best that you fix broken images as quickly as you can and provide alt text for each one of your images in the event that they do break.
Images might break due to there being a mismatch between the file format in the image’s code and the file format the image was uploaded with, the image file’s path being changed, the image file being renamed or the image file being deleted from your server.
In these cases, the code for your image frame will remain, but it won’t contain an image, so it’ll feature a broken image icon instead or your alt text.
Excuse the dummy text from Cupcake Ipsum.
You can monitor broken image links with any broken link checker, including Google Search Console, Ahrefs’ broken link checker and Broken Link Checker.
11. Create original images
As John Mueller of Google states about stock photography:
“I think if you wanted to use them as a decorative element on a page, it’s perfectly fine. It adds a little bit flavor, a little bit more color to the post, or to whatever content we have there.
So if it’s a, I don’t know, a Halloween themed article, then adding… I don’t know… stock photography of a spider…that would be perfectly fine…
But I think the aspect there is it’s stock photography. And if people are searching for Halloween photos, it’s unlikely that we would show up in the search results for that.
We would have that image, but probably, I don’t know, 20, 30 other sites have the same image, and they all have a license for it, and showing it is fine.
And perhaps even the original stock photography site has that image in the search results. And if you’re searching for something like a Halloween image, then you probably want to go with the original site…
I guess the other aspect is also you wouldn’t rank for this in Image Search, but it doesn’t count against it either.”
Stock images are fine if they’re merely decorative for a landing page, but if you want your images to stand out in search, you need to be original.
Take your own screenshots, create graphics with Canva, GIMP or Adobe Illustrator, and shoot real-life, high-quality images with your smartphone camera or a DSLR camera.
More importantly, create more infographics that display data and information.
These types of images can earn you backlinks. Other sites will download them, place them on their own site and link to you as the original source.
Canva and Piktochart have plenty of infographic templates.
Note: On the subject of stock photography, a lot of folks have focused on this as a reason why some sites have been demoted in search. Google isn’t going to demote your site for using stock photography. Unique photography is typically better for users. And what’s better for users can influence engagement metrics that can lift your rankings. Yes, it’s a nuanced topic.
12. Submit an image sitemap
Sitemaps are resource files that contain links to URLs on your site, letting search engine bots know which pages to crawl and index. You should already have one submitted to Google Search Console for your entire site.
You can submit a separate sitemap just for image URLs as well. This helps search engine crawlers find images that are loaded by JavaScript, such as images on web pages in which lazy loading is enabled.
Image sitemaps also help emphasize the importance of your images and how they’re not just decorative.
You can create an image sitemap manually, but it’s much easier to generate one automatically. Use tools from MySitemapGenerator, Angel Digital Marketing and Auctollo.
If you use WordPress, most SEO plugins will include this feature. For example, we use SEOPress for this and other features.
Add the sitemap URL these tools generate for you as a new sitemap in Google Search Console.
Update your sitemaps regularly to include new content. Again, WordPress SEO plugins will typically ensure your sitemaps are updated automatically.
13. Add structured data to your pages
Structured data is data that receives a standardized format that makes it easier for software and humans alike to consume said data.
Google Search displays structured data in the form of recipes, news articles, forum posts and more.
Here’s a simple list of structured data you can add to your site that Google supports and contains images:
- Articles
- Course info
- Event
- Image metadata
- Movie
- Recipe
- Vehicle Listing
14. Use open graph image tags
Open graph tags optimize the way your article previews look when they’re shared on social media.
This will increase clicks as well as traffic you receive from social media, which will help your SEO efforts as a whole.
In WordPress, your SEO plugin likely generates Open Graph tags automatically. You can also use a plugin like Open Graph.
Certain CMS’s also generate Open Graph tags automatically, including Squarespace, Wix and Shopify.
So, if you have a WordPress SEO plugin or one of the CMS’s listed above, you likely don’t need to do anything.
Otherwise, you can generate a short code snippet with an open graph generator tool and upload it to wherever your CMS accepts code snippets. Unfortunately, you’ll need to do this for each article you want to share on social media.
Final thoughts
Rarely do site owners put much thought into optimizing images for SEO. But it is worth doing.
It can help you get more traffic and in some cases it can help you acquire more links.
Backlinks especially will be helpful in improving your rankings across the board.
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