Do you need help with the SEO topic you should prioritise in 2023?
Artificial intelligence, voice search, and augmented reality are all vying to become the next king of search. It will take some time before we move on to the future of SEO, regardless of which horse you back. We must continue considering web search in its current incarnation in the interim. I’d like to discuss the component of search that you are all too familiar with: photos. Even though the majority of websites substantially rely on them, they should be more frequent.
Your website can gain the competitive SEO advantage it needs in 2023 by fixing image-related SEO concerns. Of course, SEO is vital in every area. However, visitors need to pay more attention to your keywords, and backlinks, let’s face it. They are only interested in what they can immediately experience from your content, and visual information is crucial.
Visuals can help you whenever you need to learn, find, or purchase something. Images can help you find exactly what you’re looking for. Images have a more significant impact on your rankings than you think because they are directly related to user search intent and user experience. According to First Site Guides’s Search, images account for 62.6% of all Google searches. And their numbers are growing. See how important they are?
Let’s explore the technique for converting your photographs into click-bait user traps.
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Original Images With Context Will Get More Clicks
Consider yourself the user.
When you search for something on Google, several images appear when you select the Images tab. They all have a similar appearance, if not an exact match.
Which do you choose to click?
Well, if there isn’t much difference, you pick randomly. Out of a group of identical search results, one website is fortunate while the others are not. Returning to the website owner’s viewpoint, you can see how less than ideal this circumstance is.
How To Make Your Images Stand Out
Therefore, the solution is to design and employ original images that don’t exist anywhere else and exploit intent if you want your site to be the user’s first pick. This is especially true if you consider images’ essential role in converting visitors into leads.
The Justification:
Can the search intent of your target audience be met by a picture you didn’t create yourself?
The perfect picture contains material directly relevant to the user’s search.
For instance, images with instructions are helpful for recipe websites. Try searching “how to cook an egg” on Google and check out the visual results. What image would you choose to click?
You’re going to click on the infographic, right?
Hats up to the people who chose not to rely on other people’s efforts as a crutch or the yolks, um, people. That is your compelling case for producing your images.
Last but not least, original photos and content protect you from copyright violations and hefty fines.
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Find & Fix Broken Images
What could go wrong with an image? Displaying the snap failed
Even if there was nothing significant to present, the damaged image icon ruins the ideal user experience.
Obviously, the impact is significantly worse if you require users to see the image. Any online store would need a product image to have a product page.
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Image Optimisation Increase Page Speed
One of the main issues with graphics is how they affect your loading time because Google prefers quick-loading websites.
Naturally, you want to limit the size of the images on your site.
How to Speed Up Your Site by Reducing Image Size
To optimise your photos, try these steps:
- Save your images in the best possible way. The optimal format for huge photographs is typically JPEG, and SVG should only be used for icons and logos. Be cautious while using WEBP because some browsers do not support it even though it offers high quality and small file size (and is a suitable replacement for the large GIF).
- Set the ideal height and width manually. Never make an image too big or too little.
- Compress your data. Although lossy compression is acceptable if the final image has a nice appearance, lossless compression is more quality-friendly.
- Combine pictures in one. However, only when you have two or more photographs positioned side by side. In this instance, combining them into a single image is preferable because doing so will result in fewer page elements, reducing server requests and speeding up loading.
- Employ lazy loading. It makes the content currently visible on the screen load more quickly by preventing page elements from loading until the user scrolls down to where they are on the page. The loading=”lazy” attribute, which you place inside the img> tag, is supported by Google Chrome.
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Responsive Images
Let’s delve a little more into image proportions.
You want your photographs readily visible on all devices, which is ideal (and reasonable). However, various screen sizes are available, with PCs and smartphones being the most common.
How do you ensure that the identical image displays flawlessly everywhere?
The secret is to create a responsive image. Make it automatically scale to fit any screen, in other words.
How to Create Responsive Images
WordPress automatically makes photos responsive, but if you must do it by yourself, there are a few options:
- CSS width and height should be 100% and auto, respectively. The image will scale both up and down in this manner.
- Maximum width should be 100%. In this situation, the image will never enlarge past its original dimensions.
- img srcset> is to be used. For various screen sizes, it shows a different version of the image. The catch is that to use this attribute, you must prepare multiple versions of the same idea.
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Optimise Keywords in Image Names, Alt Text, and More
When I hear “SEO,” the first thing that comes to mind is “keywords.” Maybe it’s just me, however.
There are numerous ways that keywords can improve the SEO of your photographs.
Know when and where to utilise them.
How to Improve Images for SEO
If you want to step up your image SEO game, try adding targeted keywords to these five places:
- Filename. Stay away from names like “image1, pic2,” etc. These names offer nothing to search engines.
- File location Search engines can understand more context from the domain and subdirectory names. For instance, if you own an online store selling fishing equipment, you might arrange the URL of a picture like this: https://fishing.com/images/fishing-rods/spinning-rod/falcon-bucoo.png.
- Text around. Users see this, and it works best to accentuate visuals. Your image’s score can be increased by adding a small amount of pertinent text (such as a caption) nearby.
- Link text. An anchor text that describes the image will aid search engines in understanding the link that links directly to it.
- ALT text Forgetting to include anything in your image ALTs, much less a description with a few keywords, is one of the most typical SEO errors. Although you might not think it matters much, users who use screen readers have trouble with blank ALTs. And Google is concerned about accessibility.
Next, look for any missing ALT texts on your website in WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview.
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Geotag Your Images For Local SEO Benefits
A word of advice for local SEO for all the establishments out there. Search engines have additional data to work with when you add geolocation metadata to your photographs.
The search engine can pinpoint a location’s location if there are coordinates associated with the image of that location. And if a person is looking for information about that specific location, that image may be helpful.
Adding a Geotag to Your Photos
Modern cameras and smartphones frequently come equipped with a geotagging feature. You can complete this task using software or online service if yours doesn’t. For instance, GeoImgr is cost-free and straightforward to use.
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Create An Image Sitemap
The quickest method for search engines to find your website’s pages is through sitemaps. What about a complete sitemap for your images?
Although it may appear excessive at first, Google endorses it. An excerpt from Google’s blog follows:
Contrary to regular sitemaps, which impose cross-domain restrictions, image sitemaps allow the inclusion of URLs from other domains.
Therefore, hosting a picture on your domain is unnecessary; it will still function for you. Right, that sounds like a dream.
How to Create a Sitemap for Images
The hitch is that websites frequently contain a large number of photos.
Although creating your sitemap for them is an option (and Google offers an example), manually adding hundreds or thousands of picture URLs would take forever. Sadly, few free automated services are available to accomplish it for you.
Of course, if you are an IT god, you can develop a script to scrape picture URLs and add them to a sitemap. We suggest Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, which includes an XML Sitemap Generator, for weaklings. With up to 500 URLs, it may generate picture sitemaps in its free version.
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Use Image Caching to Speed Up Your Website
A man who learns to fish will be fed for the rest of his life. A browser will preserve images for as long as necessary when images are cached.
Indeed, browsers don’t need instruction, but you get the concept.
The browser will retrieve an image from the cache rather than loading it again when you visit a website after it has been saved there, and it does save time.
Setting Up Image Caching to Speed Up Your Website
Set the expiration times for your images in the. htaccess file for your website.
The expiration times may be a partial year. You are welcome to choose your own based on how frequently you update your photographs.
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Add Structured Data To Images To Aid Google In Understanding Your Content
Search engines can understand a page’s content thanks to structured data.
All websites can profit from it, but ecommerce websites, in particular, find it a tremendous blessing. Rich snippets can also be included in image search results and expected search results.
Check out the tiny badge with the words “Product” and “In stock” on it. The customer could visit the site with just one click; you can rely on that.
Google Images supports product and recipe kinds. Apply them wisely.
How to Use Schema to Mark Up Your Images
Use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper tool to create structured data code for your pages. Although free, a Google Search Console account connected to your domain is necessary.
It operates as follows:
- Paste the URL of the page you wish to mark up after choosing a data type. To begin tagging, click.
- The page will be seen by the tool. You can mark up an element by highlighting it. Pick the relevant tag from the option that appears. For instance, if an image is clicked, choose Image; if a product’s price is highlighted, select -> Offer Price.
- Once your desired tags have been included, click Create HTML to generate the code.
Your code can also be tested and validated using Markup Helper.
It was more straightforward than you thought, right? The only drawback is that it can take up to three weeks for it to take effect.
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Make Your Images Shareable
Utilise social media to increase your publicity efforts. There always needs to be more of those.
Search engines will consider your pages more essential and relevant the more shares they receive.
How To Make Your Pictures Social Media Shareable
Users are more likely to share an original photograph, first and foremost. Making your pictures with sincere effort is a fantastic place to start.
Here’s when it gets technical.
Usually, the effort is not involved in allowing the ability to share your photographs. Hero photos are already shared in WordPress, and copy the URL of the page and paste it into your social media post.
WordPress pulls off this ruse by adding OpenGraph tags to the pages’ metadata.
You guessed it: those items with property=”og” hold the key. You can manually add them to your pages’ metadata if your website doesn’t generate them automatically.
However, installing a plugin like Share This Image is considerably more straightforward. The users will then be able to share the photographs from your website on social media quickly.
Final Thoughts
Images won’t disappear even though Google is experimenting with artificial intelligence and creating new types of search. Picture search will only improve shortly, meaning new image SEO strategies will emerge.
The foundation, though, is likely to remain relatively the same. If you master it now, your website will be prepared for the impending storm in image SEO and rank higher.
DMA SEO Copywriting Services would be able to help engage your audience with capturing images while keeping it relevant to the topic discussed. Engage with us to get a free quote on the above mentioned service now.
