One, usually underrated SEO optimizations is related to the images.
As a matter of fact, it often happens that webmasters upload images too large and not optimized for the web on their websites . Nothing could be more wrong.
Photos play a very important role in an SEO project today as Google gives more and more space in the SERP to pictures, PDFs, videos and multimedia content in general.
In this article I will give you some tips to make a good image optimization for SEO for your site. Let’s begin!
How to optimize the photos of your site for SEO?
Especially with the roll out of the Google mobile first index algorithm in the first half of 2018, today’s web sites must be particularly fast. Very often, one of the reasons that makes a website slow, is the weight of the photographs.
Size and Weight
Upload images of the right size and weight on web sites. Thanks to tools that everyone can use, it is possible to bring a picture, resize it and compress it without loosing its quality.
A very useful tool for this purpose is tinypng.com which compresses the desired image in few seconds without losing its quality.
Immediate actions like thatwill make your site faster and safer.
To check the speed of a web site, and as in this case, the problems related to the images, you can use GT Metrix which will help you to understand what and where to optimize. In fact the two parameters to check are: Optimize Images and Specify image dimension. If you have a slow score you can expand the tab and see what you have to work on.
File Name and HTML attribute
When you upload an image on a web site you must pay attention on the name that you give to the file.
The image to be loaded on a precise page, which wants to position itself for a specific keyword, should, as a file name of the pic, contain the same search query of the page.
The file name must be SEO friendly as it will represent the URL of the image once uploaded online.
For this reason it is important to always rename a photographs bought rom an image banks:
Therefore avoid errors like this:
- domain.com/IMG_201.jpg
Instead, use name file such as:
- domain.com/image-optimization-for-seo.jpg
Not only the file name has to be correctly written, but the uploaded image must contain essential HTML attributes such as the ALT TAG Image and TITLE.
Both are intended to describe the content of the image, to optimize them from an SEO perspective it is important to include within them the keyword for which we intend to rank the photo.
<img title=”beautiful white cat on the table” src=”cat-on-the-table.jpg” alt=”beautiful white cat on the table” width=”200″ height=”250″ border=”0″ />
Reconnected to the size argument, it is also recommended to specify the width and height attribute that must correspond to the real size of the loaded image.
Indexing pictures with the Sitemap
Once uploaded the optimized images on a web site, all that is left is to add all the URLs in a dedicated sitemap.xml and send it to Google via Search Console.
That way Google will have a reference during its scans.
Image optimization with WordPress Galleries
There are several plugins on the most popular CMS such as Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Some of them are not SEO friendly while many others are quick and do not slow down your website. Final Tiles Grid Gallery has many useful SEO features like: lazy loading, alt tags, speed and image optimisation.
CONCLUSION
In this article, written with the kind support of Andrea Gavardi an Italian SEO Specialist, I have described how to optimize the photographs of your website to make it faster and SEO Friendly. The technical aspects to be taken into consideration are not many but they can make the difference in a SEO project.
Now the image optimization for SEO it’s not a secret anymore!
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