Images are increasingly important to the customer experience and search, especially in the period of inbound marketing. The usage of visuals makes viewers more attractive and interesting with your sites when they visit your online stores, so you can keep them staying longer with you. Additionally, images play a great role in supporting SEO. According to R.J Pittman, Google Director of Product Management (2009), image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google Searches and 5% of all searches are image related.
Yet, many sites have not paid much attention to image optimization or a lot of store owners are wondering a question: Why don’t their images show up in results of search engines?
Being aware of this issue, I are pleased to share with you 5 rules to optimize images for SEO. A few tips from Magestore extensions for more attractive website outlook will be revealed in the last part as well. Hope that it comes in very handy!
Rule 1: File Name
Why should change file name?
Choosing a new image name related to content helps enhance your ranking in search engine as search engines crawl both the text on the webpage and keywords within your image file names.
The action of changing image file name, in fact, is not compulsory, but extremely helpful. Regularly, we have a habit of uploading images with the same name as saved in camera, this is easy and quick but images in this case do not perform any functions except for illustration.
Image name related to content will enhance your ranking in search engine
How to adopt a new file name
A successful file name is a descriptive and rich-keyword name in plain English. In order to choose right words for images, you should look at your website analytics to discover what your customers are searching for. Then, use these words and their synonyms. Another source for image file names is Google Analytics, you can find what key words are searched for most.
Rule 2: File Size
Why should limit file size
When your images are in large size, surely they can look good both in your sites themselves and in other social media channels when you share them. Thus, some people think “the bigger, the better”. However, this leads to increase in page load time.
Large images need more time to load pages
There is a fact that most consumers wait about 3 seconds for a website to load on a desktop or laptop and about 5 seconds on their mobile device (KISS metrics, 2012). In addition, Amazon found that if their pages slow down by 01 second, they lose $1.6 billion a year.
If you have an image needed over 15 seconds to load, it means saying goodbye to prospective customers.
How to control file size
Firstly, you can make a smaller image and provide the option to view a larger image in a pop-up or to be displayed on a separate webpage.
Secondly, you may take advantage of online and offline tools to resize your images. Two effective offline tools you should consider are Adobe Photoshop and GIMP; the former saves for the Web command; the latter is an open-source, free image editing software application that can be run on Windows, Mac or Linux.
Moreover, some online tools we would like to mention are PicMonkey, Pixlr and FotoFlexer. In detail:
- PicMonkey has been described by experts as a “staggeringly great photo editing tool”.
- Pixlr is super user-friendly, and also comes with a 100% free app for your smartphone, so you can edit on the go.
- FotoFlexer is another fairly advance online image editor. FotoFlexer even allows you to work with layers!
Rule 3: Alt Tags
Why should use Alt Tags
Alt Tags are texts associated with an image that serves the same purpose and convey the same essential information as the image. Alt Tags support SEO through helping search engines understand images. Moreover, they allows customers to know what your pictures about in situations where the images are not available to the reader, perhaps because they have turned off images in their web browser or are using a screen reader due to a visual impairment, Alt Tags ensure that no information or functionality is lost.
Example of Alt Tag for a picture of Halloween 2013
How to write a Alt Tags
A perfect Alt Tag should meet the following requirements:
- Describe your images in plain English, just like you do for image file names.
- Use model number or serial numbers in your Alt Tag if they have.
- Do not stuff keywords in your alt tags, so keep it short. If longer, put the important details first.
- Don’t use alt tags for decorative images. Search engines may penalize you for over-optimization.
Rule 4: File Types
Why should choose different file types for images
There are three common file types of images: JPEG, GIF and PNG. However, each type is very different from others, so understanding the features of them is important to choose the right type in each situation.
JPEG images are able to be compressed considerably, which results in quality images with small file sizes.
GIF images are lower quality images than JPEGs and are used for more simple images such as icons and decorative images.
PNG images support many more colors than GIFs and they do not degrade over time with re-saves like JPEGs. However, the file sizes can be much larger than what you would find with JPEG images.
How to choose suitable file types
For most ecommerce situations – JPEGs will be your best bet. They provide the best quality and the smallest file size.
Never use GIFs for large product images. The file size will be very large and there is no way to reduce it. Use GIFs for thumbnails and decorative images.
PNGs can be a good alternative to both JPEGs and GIFS. If you are only able to get product photos in PNG format, try using PNG-8 over PNG-24. PNGs excel at simple decorative images because of their extremely small file size.
Rule 5: Site Maps
Why should use site maps
Web crawlers cannot find images that are not called out in the webpage source code, so make sure you let them know about these images by listing their location in an image site map.
How to use site maps
You can use the extension for images on Google Sitemaps to give Google more information about the images on your website, and help Google find more images than what would be conventionally found through their search engine.
Although using Sitemaps does not guarantee that your images will get indexed by Google, you can absolutely increase the optimization of your website, and especially the images by using Sitemaps. Google Webmaster Tools has many suggestions for correctly formatting your Sitemap and the images for your Sitemap.
On Google Sitemaps, it is important for you to add specific tags for all of the images. You can also create a separate Sitemap to list images. What is important is to add all the necessary information, while using specific tags, to any Sitemaps you have or will create.
Conclusion
I have mentioned 5 rules to help you to optimize images and raise your rank in search engine result. Despite the fact that it is not compulsory, it will surely surprise you! Let’s review your images and share with us something special about your images.
