SEO for WordPress is not a new thing, but how about optimizing images for both websites and SEO? The blog explains it.
Search engines matter a lot for improving visibility and building the brand. Be it an online store for selling photos or a WordPress-based portfolio to show your photography talent, you need to optimize images for SEO to get a higher ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).
Here we discuss an effective strategy to keep in mind to optimize images for web and SEO.
SEO is about to grab the attention of the right people toward your website. When the SEO efforts are proper, chances are high that your website can appear above your competitors’ sites on SERPs. But then, you need to optimize the images for SEO along with the web content.
Now, optimizing the image SEO for WordPress website is a bit complex and difficult.
Here we elaborate four effective tips to optimize images for SEO:
- 1. Best Images are Necessary
- 2. Select the Proper File Name
- 3. Scale Images for SEO
- 4. Technical Image SEO
Okay. Let’s start elaborating this list by selecting the most appealing images.
1. Select Best Images:
As a designer or photographer, you have a deep insight into the quality and visual appeal of the image. Chances are fair that you’ve kept only high-quality images in your portfolio to showcase your skills.
Here, we would like to add that the same should be applied to the blog post or ‘About’ page. Yes, these two pages deserve cool images snatched or developed by you instead of stock imagery.
Do you know, stock images can harm SEO by changing the customer’s perception about your website? You may argue that your website has a great portfolio and probably very attractive ‘About’ page also.
Then why do people expect the great images in the blog section as well? Actually, great images can display your skills whereas stock photos are common and people see them on various websites.
Ultimately, stock photos put a question mark on your professionalism or talent. On the other hand, if you use original and eye-catching images everywhere on your website, it can help you make the awesome first impression.
What’s more, when you select the pictures, ensure that they are responsive. SRCset attribute can help images work on any display size. Responsiveness is another important condition for better SEO outcome.
2. Avoid Random Names for Images
Google cannot ‘read’ the images, right? So, unless we define them, the search engine has no idea of what our images are about. It indicates the importance of giving the right file name to the images for SEO purpose. Random names like the selection of letters, numbers, or special characters can make your images unimportant for the search engine.
Source:YouTube.com
You need to use the relevant keywords and phrases for all the selected photos for image SEO optimization. For example, if you are a photographer, you can use category names ahead of the short image name. Like, if your image shows the sunset at the sea, you can write the file name as Nature_Sunset_at_Sea or simply, Nature-Sunset.
The random or unique name does not show the originality of your images. Maybe your camera attributes a combination of a few letters and numbers to all your images, but you need to change them before uploading them online for better SEO result.
3. Take Care of Image Size
The size of images matters when it comes to optimizing them for your WordPress website. If a large image is uploaded in a smaller space on the web page, it will obviously take more time to load.
Therefore, you should resize the image before uploading. It is better to compress the image with the help of tools like tinypng.com to make sure that your website loads quickly.
Remember, the most important thing for your WordPress website in the online world is reduced load time. You can decrease the bounce rate significantly by reducing the PLT (Page Load Time). In other words, people will stay on your website for a longer time if it loads faster.
Here we give two methods to optimize images for the WordPress website. They can help your website load swiftly while maintaining the quality of your images.
i. WordPress Plugins
One of the biggest reasons for the growing popularity of WordPress is its large collection of plugins. We have WordPress plugins for every important function. You can use a few WordPress plugins that optimize every uploaded image on your website. All you get is optimized images with reduced file size.
A few noteworthy WordPress plugins are WP Smush and EWWW Image Optimizer. The major drawback of such plugins is they can reduce the size of an image, but the very large image can still cause a problem while loading.
Some most reliable and robust portfolio plugins like Portfolio Designer can also help you optimize and arrange images in the portfolio form in a responsive and systematic way.
ii. Photo Editing Tools
As a professional photographer and a designer, you must have heard about Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. Well, these are photo editing tools that you can use to reduce the overall size of your images. The preview shows the optimized image to check its quality.
After uploading the optimized images and building the website, you can use Pingdom or Google PageSpeed to find the speed or your website.
4. Consider Technical Aspects of SEO
Apart from image-related aspects, you need to take care of other technical aspects. It can make your image SEO for WordPress more effective.
Captions- You should give a short but proper introduction of your image for the visitors who are going through your article or blog.
Alt text- Both Alt and Title Text are essential for every image. You can use the keyword in Alt Text of your image
Structured image data- The search engines can display your images as rich results if your image content contains structured data. The structured image data is necessary for strengthening your website’s presence in the Google search engine.
Your WordPress website can give your business a strong online identity. As we have mentioned here, the Image SEO needs a blend of various aspects from the quality and size of images to name and Alt text is necessary to optimize images for SEO. It is advisable to consult a reliable web solutions provider to get more insight on image SEO. Also, qualified and experienced WordPress web developers can guide you more about the topic.
At Solwin Infotech, we have an in-house team of SEO professionals who can help your website or an eCommerce store make the most from major search engines like Google and Bing.
If you wish to optimize your business website for better visibility, feel free to contact us. We render enterprise-grade web development and SEO services at competitive rates.