Recently Google has updated its policy for search engine results for images. Every SEO professional is aware about the importance of Google Image SEO. It gives us an additional option to enhance traffic and generate backlinks in easiest manner. If we build backlinks by using images, we can generate some high quality backlinks which are not at all easy to generate by text or any other format. Because of its importance in web content, search engines built strong metrics and encouraging website owners to optimize images for better SEO results. Today, I am going to share few amazing Google image SEO tips which can help you drive more traffic.
Use of ALT attribute for image description
Images are easy to remember by humans and help us to drive engagement and kill the bounce rate at the same time. It’s very easy for us to convey our message to website visitor by placing an image or info-graphic. But search engine crawlers are not humans, they are bots and in order to make them understand about image property we use “ALT” text which is a description of image for crawlers. Google and other major search engines don’t look for all images. Being a website owner it’s your job to let them know about your website images.
Why “ALT” attribute is important in image optimization?
Everyone has internet access and most of the time internet speed is good but imagine a situation when a user is viewing your website on a browser that is slow because of internet speed and unable to show images. Or the browser does not support images. It would be hard for the user to understand web content. For example your website contains steps with pictures and user is not able to see pictures.
Let’s take another example; hypothetically a visitor is using alternative technology such as screen reader which has no function to find images then visitor would not proceed further on your website or blog. But if you are using “ALT” attribute correctly, you can solve this problem with ease.
Avoid Generic Names
There are billions of website which provides information and have images but not every site use customized names for each and every image. Usually website owners upload images with generic names such as image.jpg, pic.jpg, abc.gif, xyz.png and 123.gif and sometime its date formats. Instead of following this practice, use customized names which can give you a chance to use more keywords with images.
But do not over stuff images with keywords. Keep it simple and short for example:
Good practice: seoguy.jpg
Bad Practice: best-seo-platform-seoguy.jpg
You should always avoid stuffing additional keywords in image name. It is a myth that adding keywords in image names could give you additional SEO benefits. It is not at all a good practice for Google image SEO
Create Image Sitemap
Creating image sitemap is another way to let Google and other search engines to inform about website images. It helps search engines bots to crawl all images of website. You can follow Google guidelines for Image Sitemap to take help while creating image sitemap.
Deal with Decorative images
Any non productive image is considered as decorative image. For example background images, button images, borders images and image frames. The best option to deal with decorative images is using CSS stylesheets or applying CSS when it is required. Use CSS to define background color and borders. If needed you can create frames and adjust background textures as well.
Pro Google Image SEO Tips:
- Use png-8 to cut down the size of a GIF image
- Use compressed images instead while using for banners and wallpapers.
So these were few tips for Google Image SEO. Hope this would help you to draft a better SEO Strategy for images on your website. If you have any feedback or suggestion for this article then do comment below. Let’s make it a better SEO Answers platform.