When it comes to ranking a website, written content isn’t everything. The images that accompany each text are just as important to boost your page… if you optimize them correctly. Learn about Google Image Search SEO.
What is Google Image Search SEO?
Google Image Search SEO (or SEO for images) is the strategy dedicated to optimizing a site’s photos so that they gain visibility in search engines.
An image can be eye-catching and of quality, but it must be described so that Google recognizes it as content worthy of the top positions. Through this description (which is in the HTML code), the search engine will understand what the image is about and the content of the site.
This way, your photos will have priority in Google Images results and your site will rank higher in the search results.
Why optimize your images?
1. Increase in organic traffic
Since Google Images ranks second in the number of online searches, you can get more visitors (and potential customers) with optimized images. In other words, the more visibility on Google Images, the more organic traffic to your site.
Having good images can attract young consumers such as millennials or gen Z, since 62% of them prefer visual content over written content.
2. Improve thematic relevance
Google’s search engine is a robot that “scans” the words on each page. If your images are optimized, the robot will be able to “read” them and understand what your site is about. This will allow it to offer it at the top of the search results.
Google also likes content updates, especially if they reinforce the theme of your page. You can rescue old posts, update them with fresh information and optimized images. There is evidence of sites that have done this, increasing their organic traffic by up to 111%.
3. Helps accessibility
Visually impaired people use apps and screen readers ghana phone number data that narrate the content of a web page. If the images are optimized, they will be easy for the software to read.
For example, if you have a picture of a hamburger and its alt text says “Cheeseburger and fries,” the screen reader will say it verbatim and the blind person will understand what is being said.
How to optimize images for your website?
1. Add a title, description and caption
Every image you upload has HTML attributes. These ar ej leads e specific words that are used to fine-tune the function of an image in your website’s code. Among the attributes you need to fill out to optimize your photos are the title and description.
The title is what users will see when they hover over the image. It should be no more than 16 characters long and should contain keywords (separated by a hyphen). For example: “christmas-tree”.
In the description and caption you can add relevant details about the image. For example: “Giant Christmas tree in a shopping mall.” The caption will be visible to users.
2. Add the alternative text (“image alt tag”)
Alt text will allow search engines to crawl your image gregory jacobson chief executive officer, chief product officer & co-founder quickly. It’s also what screen readers will read and what will give your page thematic relevance to appear in Google Images.
Basically, it’s a short description of the image that should also include keywords. Technically, it’s not a tag, but the term “image alt tag” is used as a synonym for alternative text.
Depending on how you work, you can write it directly in the HTML code, or also through the site’s CMS (if you work, for example, with WordPress).