There are many ways in which we can optimize our web site and web pages. I’m sure that most savvy website owners know of and understand the importance that SEO plays in making our web pages relevant and attractive to the search engines. However there is one aspect of proper SEO that is often overlooked by many site owners.
And what is it?… optimizing your images is one of the last things you think of, if it’s thought of at all! Nevertheless this can hurt your pages in a number of ways.
Not only can you hurt your own site’s SEO, you will miss out on a number of benefits that optimizing your images can provide, notable among them higher conversion rates.
For these reasons alone, it’s high time to make sure your images are optimized. Below are 5 easy ways to help with that!
5 Doable tips for optimizing your web page images
Keep your image files smallish – This is one of the easiest and best favors you can do for your page. Large image files can take eons to load on the page, causing annoyance, abandonment, and lost sales. Amazon calculated that each second lost while their images load costs them $1.6 billion per year!
Use keywords in your image filenames – This is an easy one to execute, yet many don’t think of it. Not only is this a major on-page SEO item, it will help Google figure out where and for what keyword to rank your pages. Enough said?
Take care with your ALT tags – Make sure you likewise optimize your image ALT tags (sometimes called ALT text) with associated keywords. This is how Google decides if your images show up in the search or image results, so be sure to tag every image on your site!
Use JPEGs when possible – JEPGs are now the de-facto image filetype on the Web, and you should make use of them whenever you can. They provide the best quality with the smallest file size. PNG files should be your second choice, with GIFs your last.
Use a Google Image Sitemap – This can be found in your Google Webmaster Tools, and helps Google find, index and categorize your images, making it much more likely that those images are found in Google images and search.
While optimizing the images that appear on our websites is often overlooked, it is a fundamental component of on-page SEO. When publishing new content it should be a normal routine to carefully cover all our bases for proper and effective SEO. It’s usually a simple set of steps that can make a real difference to the performance of our websites.