Do SEO and Graphics have a meeting point? Yes, even images can be optimized for search engines! A website consists of images, text, and links. All elements are relevant to the SEO of your website, but images are not always optimized for search. For this reason, we have decided to reveal all the tricks to get the most out of your website graphics, making it useful support (and not an obstacle) for your SEO.
Make your images lightweight for SEO
Images can weigh down your website and make it downright slow. For this reason, the first important SEO rule for optimizing images is to reduce their size. However, when reducing the size of the images on your website try not to neglect the quality! It will be very important for the User Experience to have captivating and quality images on your site, as long as they do not weigh it down!
To reduce the size of the image you will have to work on the pixel size and resolution. A resolution of 72 pixels is recommended, you can do this with the most common graphics programs such as Photoshop or The Gimp. Focusing on image optimization is the best way to rank your content and along with help of a basic marketing strategy, you can stand out in the market.
Do SEO from the start
Choose a name for your image file that is speaking, that is, that contains the reference keywords of the page or a related one. You will need to organize all the image tags on your website, giving your images a name that contains the right keywords.
In fact, in the SEO structure of a website whether it is related to beauty, tech r parenting, both the textual parts and the images must be taken into consideration. The advice is to build a concept map of your images, giving each the right keyword. Warning, do not use the same keyword as an image tag for two images on the same page. Rather, use related keywords for secondary images.
A day as a spider
Google’s spiders will see your image very differently from how your users will see it. Bots cannot read images. So how do spiders see images? WordPress allows us to modify three very useful fields for reading the image:
- the ALT tag
- the TITLE attribute of the IMG tag
- the text around the image.
The Alt tag is a fundamental piece of content to insert in every image on your site because it can be read by Googlebot. The caption is useful to the user, but also SEO because the texts accompanying the images are read by the Spiders, as well as by the user, as well as the title tag, which will appear by moving the cursor over the image.
Exif tags for the SEO of your images
Matt Cutts, when he was still a spokesperson for Google, explained the importance of EXIF tags for the SEO of a website. The EXIF data is, in fact, a ranking factor. The acronym stands for Exchangeable image file format and represents a set of metadata used in digital cameras that are applied to JPEG and TIFF format files. It is a series of information such as:
- date and time metadata;
- metadata about the camera (lens, brand, etc…);
- shooting settings (exposure time, ISO …);
- photo thumbnail;
Even data like these are relevant in the eyes of Google, so GTmetrix suggests deleting them where present.
SEO comes to life from the news
Whenever you bring something new to life on the web, with real user value, you are doing a good SEO job! This applies to both texts and images: optimization is precious, but if the content is also new to the web world, you are “on horseback”!